Do you know the secret way to get people to buy your products and services? About every ten years or so, there is some sort of clandestine marketing theory that circulates that suggests there is a way to psychologically cause people to favor, and even desire to buy, specific products. They don’t know why, but they are strangely attracted to certain brands.

About 60 years ago, a marketing researcher named James Vicary set the marketing world afire with his assertion that what he called "subliminal marketing” would cause people to subconsciously crave certain products. Vicary claimed he had set up an experiment in a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1957. He stated that he displayed two messages while the viewers were watching a film. The messages, "Hungry? Eat Popcorn” and "Drink Coca Cola” were projected on the big screen every 5 seconds at a rate of 1/3000^th of a second throughout the duration of the movie. The amount of time the messages were flashed on the screen was far too quick for anyone to notice them, but Vicary asserted that the human brain was able to discern what the conscious person could not and that the subliminal message caused the moviegoers to overrun the theater’s snack counter with requests for popcorn and Coke.

The only problem was that Vicary was not telling the truth. He later admitted that he did not cause a run on the movie theater popcorn machine in 1957. Some doubt he ever even performed his subliminal message test in the first place. In hundreds of tests to try to replicate Vicary’s experiment, subliminal messages have never been proven to cause anyone to try or do anything. But that did not stop people from believing that they could. Advertisers added subliminal messages to radio and TV ads in an attempt to make people psychologically predisposed to their products. Consumer watch groups cried foul! They insisted that subliminal marketing was unfair. Their complaints went all the way to the US Congress, where committee hearings were held to determine whether legislation should be enacted to restrict subliminal advertising. So, in 1974, the FCC banned all subliminal advertising on radio and TV stations even though there was never a shred of evidence that they had any impact on the buying habits of consumers.

So what is the clandestine marketing technique of today? How about those calls you get from someone claiming they can get you on the front page of Google? What about keyword stuffing SEO? What about the hoax that if you create a social media presence your web site will explode with visitors regardless of any posting you do? Don’t get me wrong, keywords and social media can be a great help in marketing your business, but you have to drive people to your web site and not be dependent on Google to do that for you. That does not happen by some secret combination of words hidden in your metadata; that happens when you post the content that engages your target market and then promote them in places where they will be seen.

Do you know what has been proven to really work in selling popcorn at movie theaters? A very large sign beside the snack bar that says "Hungry? Eat Popcorn” as the aroma of freshly popped kernels fills the entrance to a theater. That’s not very subliminal! It is actually the opposite of clandestine marketing, it is loud and in your face… it’s marketing! What works in marketing today is what has been working in marketing forever: find out what your target market wants and advertise it to them: big and bold!

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Popcorn Subliminal Advertising: Did an early experiment in subliminal advertising at a movie theater increase sales of popcorn and soda? https://www.snopes.com/business/hidden.popcorn.asp