If advertising had no impact, it would not be a multi-million-dollar industry! But this does not mean that publicity influences our behaviour. We must be able to ‘relate’ to the message and do this we must be open to receive it. It all depends on our mental state (more or less disposed or receptive) and the quality of the message. This is exactly where IM! comes into play! Like all other everyday experiences, such as a show, a telephone conversation, a brief encounter, etc., an ad can leave a trace in our memory and alter our perception of a given product or brand. Since our behaviour is determined by internal images that we have built up over time, it is fair to say that publicity can influence our behaviour but no more so than anything else we perceive.
The act of purchasing depends on a number of factors, such as the need for a product, its price, quality, etc. Advertising on its own therefore cannot provoke the act of buying. A purchase is always made under the conscious control of the buyer who takes its decision based on all of the information acquired about the product. Advertising is there to provide some of that information (product benefits, value for money, innovation, etc.) Advertising also helps to build the image that the consumer associates with the product (prestige, for example), which subsequently becomes one of the elements that contribute to the act of purchasing.
Scientific knowledge helps us to better understand how information is registered and retained. It therefore allows us to identify the elements in a message that help to create a lasting memory trace. A message that catches our attention, conveys a certain emotional content, moves us by its aesthetic design or reminds us of past experiences, has a much stronger chance of being remembered. Scientific knowledge can therefore be used to optimise both the intrinsic qualities of a message and how it is delivered over time. On the contrary, the notion of ‘manipulation’ is nothing more than an unfounded preconceived idea. The consumer is an aware and responsible being and thus fully capable of taking all available information into account before making a purchasing decision. Fortunately, no advertising campaign could ever make us buy a product against our will or knowledge.
Memory is one of our most personal attributes and nobody can influence it against our will. Our memory is constantly ‘encoding’, or registering information – even when we make no conscious effort to do so. This is what is known as ‘incidental learning’, which occurs regardless of the type of incoming information — whether advertising or not. However, we are free to pay attention to an ad or simply ignore it, in which case it will leave no impact our memory.
Memory is divided into ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ memory. Explicit memory contains information that is accessed consciously and explicitly expressed by language. Implicit memory involves the subconscious and cannot be expressed by language, only by behaviour. Implicit, procedural memory lets us perform certain tasks even if we are not consciously thinking about it (learning to snow surf, for example). It also involves priming, which is simply the facilitated ‘processing’ (i.e., recognition, identification, association) of an object encountered previously. We are constantly priming without being aware of it, every time we perceive an object that we have already come across; all that is required is for the object to resemble the previous one. This ‘facilitating mechanism’ is ubiquitous and is of course also found in advertising. Simply seeing a product in an ad greatly facilitates recognition at the point of sale. In this regard, we can say that advertising has an impact on our subconscious but no more or less than everything else we perceive around us.
A subliminal message is one that is below the absolute threshold for awareness. Whether subliminal messages can influence our behaviour has been the subject of much debate, often fuelled by the supposed manipulative powers of advertising. Over the past years, a number of scientific studies have been conducted to resolve the issue once and for all. The findings show that while a subliminal communication can be deemed to have an impact on behaviour (many studies fail to prove this), the effect is very short-lived and disappears totally within a few seconds. In light of this, it is clear that purchasing behaviour could not be stimulated by subliminal advertising messages.
