The Influence Of Subliminal Persuasion On Consumer Behavior Based On Visual-auditory Modality

In the business dictionary, persuasion is a process aimed at changing a person’s (or a group’s) attitude or behavior toward some event, idea, object, or other person(s), by using written or spoken words to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or a combination thereof. While, in the field of consumer behavior, consumer behavior is the core concept and object of study, which means consumers’reaction to the product, service and the marketing of these two. And, during the marketing process, persuasion is the most critical purpose.Subliminal persuasion is the notion of affecting one’s attitude, choice or behavior by subliminal stimuli or information which is below an individual’s threshold for conscious perception. Researches in this topic focused on the visual and auditory modality. Respectable evidences showed that subliminal persuasion could evoke consumer demands, like subjective feeling of hunger or thirst. Although visual subliminal persuasion played an important role in consumer demands, such effectiveness was not able to fully reach a behavioral level. While on the other hand, researches of auditory subliminal persuasion focused on the popular subliminal self-help industry. There were some evidence showing that self-help audiotapes work, but there were even more showing they do not work as the marketers asserted. Reviewing these studies we found it is probable that the interest involved in such researches partly destroyed the neutrality of researchers. Besides, what the existing researches employed were self-help products on-sale or offered by the manufacturer, which made it hard to examine whether the real information was what they claimed or not. Meanwhile, studies had found people could not process a whole sentence subliminally, while most of the subliminal message embedded in the audiotapes were sentences, this might be another reason why the effect was limited.Multi-sensory integration, the influencing of information on individual’s perception, decision and overt behavior, coming from different sensory modality, has been a research focus in the field of basic research. Multi-sensory integration also gains more and more attention in consumer behavior domain. And visual-auditory sensory integration is a hot topic in both multi-sensory integration field and the narrower, multi-sensory integration in marketing, for the visual and auditory are the source of 97% everyday message accepted. The music promoted effects of the advertisements when it was congruent with the visual information. Moreover, compared with single modality, multi-sensory integration, especially visual-auditory integration, intensified people’s sensory ability of objects.There is almost no finding in subliminal visual-auditory persuasion, while there are some in visual-auditory integration of implicit learning, which shared some common characteristics. The existing studies showed that in the field of implicit learning, participants processed every modality independently, not affected by other modalities, which is not like what happened in the supra-threshold multi-sensory integration. And two experiments conducted by Li Xiujun confirmed this too.To sum up, in this study two experiments were designed to explore the influence of subliminal persuasion on consumer behavior based on visual-auditory modality.Experiment one employed a 2×2 between-subject design, taking visual stimuli as the independent variable and attitude to the brand, consumer demand and willingness-to-purchase as the dependent variables. The purpose of experiment one was to explore the influence that visual-auditory modality integration of subliminal persuasion had on consumer behavior. Results showed in the influence of brand attitude, main effect of auditory stimuli to "I believe Nike shoes are of good quality" was significant, further, rating of the quality of Nike shoes in the without-auditory-stimuli-group was higher than which in the with-auditory-stimuli-group; the interaction effect of visual and auditory stimuli to the variable "my favorite sports brand" was also significant, and when there was no visual stimuli, proportion of those who considered Nike as their favorite brand in the with-auditory-stimuli-group was lower than those in the without-auditory-stimuli-group. In the influence of consumer demand, the interaction effect of visual and auditory stimuli to "I hope to have more shoes" was significant, moreover, when there was no auditory stimuli, willingness of those who hoped him/herself to have more Nike shoes in the with-visual-stimuli-group was stronger than those in the without-visual-stimuli-group.Experiment two was a single factor, between-subject design, taking auditory stimuli as the independent variable, food and water intake as the dependent variables. The purpose of experiment two was to further examine the effectiveness of auditory subliminal persuasion. It turned out that this experiment replicated the results in the previous one——subliminal auditory persuasion had a counter-productive effect on consumer behavior, and this time, such consumer behavior evolved to behavioral level from attitudinal level. Subliminal auditory persuasion made the participants eat more m & m’s chocolate, however, the water intake was uninfluenced.Thus, according to the present study, we concluded that 1) visual-auditory subliminal persuasion has an impact on brand attitude, consumer demand and food intake; 2) subliminal auditory persuasion can influence not only attitude, but also behavior.