Priming happens all the time. How are marketers priming you to part with your money? In so many ways you'll never even suspect. Priming is so obvious that it seems normal but we are getting primed all the time for the experiences we have in stores, computers, mobile devices and print ads. It's a multi-billion dollar industry that leans heavily on priming consumers for reducing resistance and targeting certain products. Learn more from the articles on priming we have below.
How are Marketers Priming You to Part With Your Money?
"Priming" Can Play Us Like Puppets
Quick: When's the last time you bought flowers at a grocery store? Never? Yet when you walk through the door at most grocery chains, what's the first thing you see? Here's what's right inside the door at Whole Foods:
…These are grocery stores, people are there to buy food. Why would they lead off with a fringe product that 99 percent of the shoppers probably won't even look at? It has to do with the subtle science of mind control known as priming.
Yes, it is entirely possible to manipulate people into certain behaviors without them knowing it. We're not talking about subliminal suggestion, the disproven gimmick that claimed it could make people buy products by inserting hidden messages in movies. No, the real technique is priming, and it's as sinister as a windowless white van at a playground.
What? How?
The idea behind the flowers is that, as we've touched on elsewhere, hitting you with a product that is highly perishable yet fresh will "prime" you into thinking of freshness, and that you will carry that "freshness" mindset with you all the way back to the discount meat case. It sounds like bullshit — humans don't connect completely unrelated ideas like that, right? Yet it's confirmed pretty much every time they test it.
Sometimes "priming" is as simple as finding that people will keep a room cleaner if it smells like disinfectant – that subtle reminder is enough to make people think, "This is a clean room, I should keep it clean." But when you see how far they can take this, it gets weird.
More info on Mind control studies…
Here is Another Article From the New York Times, on Mind Control…
Priming the Unconscious
The idea of subliminal influence has a mixed reputation among scientists because of a history of advertising hype and apparent fraud. In 1957, an ad man named James Vicary claimed to have increased sales of Coca-Cola and popcorn at a movie theater in Fort Lee, N.J., by secretly flashing the words “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coke” during the film, too quickly to be consciously noticed. But advertisers and regulators doubted his story from the beginning, and in a 1962 interview, Mr. Vicary acknowledged that he had trumped up the findings to gain attention for his business.
Later studies of products promising subliminal improvement, for things like memory and self-esteem, found no effect.
Some scientists also caution against overstating the implications of the latest research on priming unconscious goals. The new research “doesn’t prove that consciousness never does anything,” wrote Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, in an e-mail message. “It’s rather like showing you can hot-wire a car to start the ignition without keys. That’s important and potentially useful information, but it doesn’t prove that keys don’t exist or that keys are useless.”
Yet he and most in the field now agree that the evidence for psychological hot-wiring has become overwhelming. In one 2004 experiment, psychologists led by Aaron Kay, then at Stanford University and now at the University of Waterloo, had students take part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player.
Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.
The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.
I think these priming results are very interesting How many of you can think of many sights, smells and sounds that could be used for priming an ordinary consumer? How are marketers priming you to part with your money? What are your triggers? How will you protect yourself from priming now that you know about it? How many times can you recognize now from your past where priming has taken place? If you ran into this priming again, would it still affect you the same way now?
