The Effect of Subliminal Stimuli Used in Promotion Videos on the Level of Liking and Remembering

Özet

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in investigating the effects of subliminal stimuli on human decisions and behavior. Do subliminal stimuli that people are not consciously aware of have any effect on their liking and recall levels? If so, can these effects be used in the consumer decision-making process? In this study, a 45-second promotional video prepared by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey was used. Three copies of the promotional video were created for positive, negative and control groups. 17 ms subliminal stimuli, of which the participants were not consciously aware, were placed 9 each in predetermined scenes for the positive group (as like emoji) and the negative group (as dislike emoji). A total of 90 students from the Department of Tourism and Hotel Management, who had not watched the video before, were divided into three groups (negative, positive and control) of 30 students each. After the video presentation, the participants were asked to immediately indicate their preference as "like or dislike" and to write down the video content (objects) they could remember. The findings reveal that the placement of negative and positive subliminal stimuli in the videos did not have a significant effect on participants' 'like or dislike' preferences. However, it was observed that the group given positive stimuli remembered the images with subliminal stimuli more than the other groups. The group given negative stimuli remembered the images with subliminal stimuli more than the control group and more than the other images in the video without subliminal stimuli. The results suggest that subliminal stimuli may be effective on recall but not on liking rate.