21st Century Advertising Strategies; My academic article related to subliminal advertising.According to the dictionary of business terms, marketing means process associated with promoting for sale goods or services. In the process of time, many products have been produced to fulfill the needs of people. Because of the product range, a competition has occurred between firms, and each producer thought that there should be a way to market their each products to be bought by consumers. That is the reason why, advertising is the most important thing to market the product in marketing. Because advertising is persuasive and informational and it is designed to influence the purchasing behavior or thought of the audience. With the developing technology, the advertising varieties have also developed and are still being developed. Tv`s, radios, newspaper, magazines are now banal. Internet, billboards, cell-phones are the new area for the advertising. Even advertisers can effect brains without we know, it is called subliminal advertising. They are doing this, because it is a kind of marketing technique, so they can make money easily, but it is discussed that subliminal advertising is ethical or not. Although subliminal advertising has many benefits in favour of manufacturers and advisers, it is not ethical in favour of moral values, competition between the companies and behavior pattern.
The first thing that makes the subliminal advertising not ethical is its damages on moral values. From 1950`s subliminal advertising has been spreading all over the world. The first example of it has been applied in a theater. Over time, it has deviated from its aim. First, it was just for advertising but then it changed into messages influence people. With
Walt Disney, we see the subliminal messages in a bad way. “Such as the infamous Disney stories, when in the 1990’s, conservative Christian groups such as the American Life League accused the children’s entertainment giant of placing subliminal messages of a sexual nature in its films. In the movie, The Lion King, the word S-E-X is spelled out by flying dust as Simba plops on the ground.”(Choma, Chris “Effects of Cartoons on Children” http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/tcom/faculty/ha/tcom103fall2004\gp9 TCOM 103 Dr. Louisa Ha November 15, 2004).
Why do they use those kinds of messages on cartoons? “The answer is clear” says Mehmet Teber (Teber, Mehmet. “Bilinçaltı Mesajlar ve Reklamcılık” August 23, 2006) “Because brain gives more reaction to the death and bird events, subliminal messages are used”. According to many researches on cartoons, it is captured that there are so many words or objects like ‘Sex’ or ‘Kill’ that they are not recognized while watching in cartoons. While your child is watching a cartoon a frame is flashing but he or she cannot recognize it.
Competition between the companies is the second thing that makes the subliminal advertising is not ethical. To use subliminal messages, companies have to deal with professional publicists, this means that big money. While some companies do that, many of them cannot, so it causes an unfairness competition area. For example; Coca-Cola can use subliminal messages in their advertisements professionally, when we look at the sales of cokes we see that Coca-Cola is ahead of the market. Big companies have to pay good deal of money. Because advertising means time, creativitiy, location in brief money. “Assume that there is a customer, who has not experienced Starbucks before, walking around the street. There are two different coffee shops one of them is Starbucks the other one is any coffee shop. The same coffee is sold in both of them but customer usually choose to go Starbucks. Why? Because there are many things that affects on customer brain like the beautiful coffee smell that is blowed to the street knowingly or the logo of starbucks includes sexual object. So Starbucks has a big market value now, they sell millions of coffees. Of course the economic strategies are playing a big role in that success but we cannot ignore subliminal advertising’s effect.”(Mert Basar, Pazarlamada kariyer , Turkcell, May 6, 2010 Isik University) and Nilda Crocker, marketing, branding and advertising expert, says “Big companies usually are the accused ones for using this kind of advertising in their advertisements in delivering the message to their customers. This is the reason why their business have become very big and successful.”(Crocker, Nilda. “Subliminal Advertising - How Your Business Can Use it to Market to Your Customers.”)
Behavior pattern is also influenced by those kind of advertising, actually subliminal advertising decide what we will do instead of our mind. For example; recently you can notice in all Cigarettes they will show people who are going through an adventure and at the end of their achievement they SMOKE, also there is an effect of subliminal messages in music on choice behavior. Starbucks that we have discussed above may be an example for influencing the behavior pattern also. Although some authorities say “You can use subliminal Cds and Mp3s while you work, study, go about your daily chores, or even exercise” of course it may not be good as much. Some of them say “Their advertisements supposedly modify the behavior of their target market into consuming their products only.” (Gorton, Gretchen T “Subliminal Advertising - How Your Business Can Use it to Market to Your Customers”)
As a conclusion, although subliminal advertising makes the companies better, it is not ethical so much in favour of moral values, competition between the companies and behavior pattern. If it is used for arguing correctly, it would be nice for people, but nowadays it is used outside of its aim. It may be easy on the ear as an strategy to develop the company or to be uniqe brand in the market, but the commercials are designed to have the child catch with the object and wanting it as soon as possible. With such devises these companies are using today, it is quite understandable why these companies bring in billions of dollars a year, so even this is a reason by oneself that subliminal advertising is not ethical.
Dogukan Gungor
Industrial Engineering, Isik University`10
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Choma, Chris “Effects of Cartoons on Children” TCOM 103 Dr. Louisa Ha 15 November 2004
<http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/tcom/faculty/ha/tcom103fall2004\gp9>
Teber, Mehmet “Bilinçaltı Mesajlar ve Reklamcılık” 23 August 2006
Personal Interview: Mert Basar, Turkcell Manager “Pazarlamada kariyer , Turkcell” 6 May 2010, Isik University)
Crocker, Nilda and Gorton, Grechen “Subliminal Advertising - How Your Business Can Use it to Market to Your Customers.”
