Using Hidden Messages in Advertisements and Logos is a Valuable Tool Toward Increasing Positive Consumer Behavior

Many consumers when viewing a product being advertised or when looking at a company's logo are fully aware of how they are feeling towards the product or company logo respectively.

The thing that consumers are not fully aware of is how advertisers can pinpoint the subconscious level of a consumer's mind in order to reap consumer approval.

The Goals of Consumers Are Vital When Discussing Subliminal Priming in Advertisements

According to an empirical journal by John A. Bargh, using hidden messages/subliminal priming is a method that aims not at producing goals for the consumer that were not previously present, but rather it aims at reinforcing or manipulating the consumer's established goals in order to garner their interest.

For example, if a company were subliminally advertising a product that served the purpose of quenching thirst, people who are not thirsty will not be affected by the subliminal priming in the advertisement. 

People who are actually thirsty on the other hand would be affected by the subliminal priming being done and it would positively affect their preference of the beverage.

By strategically targeting the goals of consumers with subliminal priming, one can see how this tool can be effective.

I interviewed Marketing Professional Hank C. Boyd, III of the University of Maryland below. Due to his focus on consumer behavior, I was able to gain information from the perspective of a professional on this matter. I asked him, “How do you believe messages made by companies/corporations in advertisements affects consumer behavior?”

Study Shows How Consumers' Choices and Intentions Towards Products Are Positively Affected Through the Use of Subliminal Primes

One of the studies that I found about subliminal priming shows with empirical data that subliminal advertising is a tool with significant effects on consumers

The primary focus of the study was on how priming consumers affects choice in brand names, specifically in this study the choice of brands between the Lipton Ice Tea beverage and Spa mineral water.

In the study, sixty-one students participated in an experiment where they were first ordered to participate in a visual detection task with the purpose of determining the accuracy in which people can detect small deviances in an image or text.

The visual detection task subliminally primed the experimental variable, Lipton Ice Tea, by first presenting the participants with a string of repeating letters in under 500 milliseconds in addition to flashing the priming phrase “Lipton Ice” in between the strings of letters. 

After this task, the participants were asked about their detection of the priming phase in which it arose that none of the participants were aware of the phrase nor did they know the true purpose of the overall task.

The participants were then instructed that they would participate in a study on consumer behavior. The participants had to decide which brand they would choose to drink between Lipton Ice Tea and Spa mineral water by pushing 'p' on a keyboard for the brand on the left side of a screen and 'q' for the brand on the right side.

The next step ordered the participants to determine their intention to drink Lipton Ice Tea. This was done by measuring their intention on a scale of one to seven, one being not likely at all and seven being very likely.

Lastly the participants were tasked to indicate their level of thirstiness. This was done after the priming in order to make it unclear whether the thirst ratings were due to levels of thirstiness or due

Graph 1

to participants being primed of their goal of quenching their thirst.

The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between levels of thirst and how likely they were to choose Lipton Ice Tea over Spa mineral water as shown in graph one.

Graph 2

In addition, the experiment also showed a positive correlation between amount of thirst and intention to drink Lipton Ice Tea as opposed to Spa mineral water as shown in graph two.

Overall, this experiment displayed how priming individuals is likely to increase choice and intentions towards a product.

If the individuals have goals/intentions associated with the purpose of the product, this conclusion is especially true.

Question asked in video clip: "When it comes to advertising, how is the subconscious aspect of consumers highlighted when advertisements are made?"

The above video clip of Mr. Boyd backs up this study of how subliminally priming consumers have the ability to promote interests in products as long as the product can satisfy the consumer's already established goals.

Targeting the Subconscious is Effective Towards Positively Controlling Individuals, Leading to Increasing Sales

According to an article from Business Insider, using subliminal elements in advertising can be used to control an individual's decision making.

A Harvard study used a popular method of subliminal priming in which the subjects played a computer game that briefly flashed words on the screen.

Half of the participants were flashed with positive words such as "wise" and "accomplished" while the other half were flashed with more negative words like "senile" and "diseased."

Although the words were flashed far too quickly to be consciously recognized, the subjects that were flashed with positive words completed the game significantly faster than the subjects flashed with negative words.

In addition, an article on LiveStrong states that subliminal messaging can control the emotions and desires of consumers in a way that is beneficial for advertisers looking to promote products.

By including elements in an advertisement that invoke happiness, excitement, and positivity that are below the level of conscious recognition, consumers are affected in a way that makes them perceive what is being advertised in a light that attracts attention and consequently attracts dollars.

Not only does subliminal priming have the ability to favorably affect consumers, but it also supplements the general experience of the entire advertisement for the viewer. 

Mr. Boyd was asked in the clip below, "What would you say are advantages to priming consumers in advertisements subliminally?"

Mr. Boyd did conclude that yes, subliminal priming can increase sales for a company, but a company still has to create an overall appealing approach to consumers beyond incorporating hidden messages within an advertisement. 

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Quiz #11 Interviews

Practice ePortfolio Video

Interview of classmate's favorite things about the Thanksgiving holiday.

Use of Laptops in a Classroom Setting Has Adverse Effects Towards Retention of Academic Information

In today's day and age of technology, the majority of students in college own laptops for academic use. According to the empirical study titled "Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom learning for both users and nearby peers" done by Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nicholas J. Cepeda, laptops are used in order to access content that can aid a student in their studies, participate in academic activities, use programs to complete tasks, and is a piece of technology that can be seen as essential to a college student's success.

Bringing Laptops to Class Increases Multitasking and Distractions in Classrooms

Also according to the study, against the academic uses of laptops, students who bring laptops to class tend to multitask frequently during the class, posing a distraction to themselves in addition to other students around this person. These multitasking acts, primarily acts that have nothing to do with the subject of the lecture, harms the encoding of what information may have been said during the class, even when not directly affected by the multitasking leading to below average performance when the information needs to be regurgitated.

In my opinion, I do believe that the use of laptops in classrooms has many benefits. Through the use of the internet, one has access to many sources that can be used to aid and advance knowledge in a subject. Students can, at will, locate articles to explain a concept, search online libraries in order to research an area of interest, look at videos that can inform about innovative ideas, and even watch authentic lectures from accredited universities, and many of these cost little to nothing to access.

Through a computer the possibilities are endless, though the disadvantages associated with laptops in classrooms overshadow such benefits. Yes, laptops offer an abundance of access to academic sources, but computers also offer an abundance of access to things far from academics. The internet of today is full of things to do socially and for pleasure that totally opposes what one may see as important academically. Bringing a laptop to the classroom tempts students to do things other than that which relates to the content the professor is lecturing about far greater than a student who uses laptops in moderation or not at all in the classroom. Perhaps further legislation by professors can aid in the resolution of this issue.

The study done by Sana, Weston, and Cepeda experimented on two areas pertaining to laptop multitasking in classroom environments. The first experiment tasked half of the participants in the study to take notes on their laptops on a lecture given in live time. The other half of the participants were ordered to take notes on their laptops in addition to doing activities on the laptop not related to the lecture that simulated tasks that someone would actually do through a web browser. The overall goal of this experiment was to determine how multitasking directly effected the student who multitasked through evaluation on a test related to the lecture given afterwards. 

In the second experiment, a different set of participants were told to take notes using pencil and paper. Confederate participants were used in this experiment with the sole purpose of multitasking on laptops and were not included in the results of the experiment. Half of the participants taking notes on paper were in view of a multitasking confederate while the other half of the participants did not have an impeded view by the confederates.  A test was also given in this experiment to evaluate how being near a multitasking student effects those who are not multitasking during a lecture.

To ensure that all participants in the study stayed on task, mediators were present in the lecture hall during the experiment in order to enforce note takers to take notes and to enforce those assigned to multitasking to multitask.

The results from both experiments were identical. Those who either multitasked during the lecture or were in the view of a multitasking student scored significantly lower on the subsequent test given than students who did not encounter multitasking in any manner. Because of the extra and unnecessary stimuli that multitasking influences upon students, gathering information and storing it for later retrieval is much more subjected to error.  

What one can learn from this study is that multitasking is not a success promoter in the classroom. Doing multiple things at once on a laptop inhibits retaining of what is most important, not just for the one person doing the act, but indeed for anyone in the vicinity as well.

In order to lower the impact of multitasking, professors can implement ways for students to get away from doing things not related to the class. Interactive classroom applications such as Echo360, LectureTools, and NearPod create methods of limiting classroom distractions in addition to creating a more immersive learning environment. Through enacting programs such as these, the problem of multitasking can be a thing of the past.

University of California Alumni Faculty Member Receives Fellowship to Extensively Research Earth's Inner Structure

As a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkley, Lekic formulated higher-resolution images of the Earth’s mantle structure, stemming from his creation of a global seismic velocity model. Not only is the model able to give geologists a better understanding of plate tectonics, but it also helps explain the movement of continental plates and their evolution, Lekic said

Lekic Received Financial Aid to Fund His In-Depth Research of the Earth

In recognition of his efforts to integrate computer science and geological studies, Lekic joined the ranks of 17 other early career U.S. scientists and engineers who were awarded a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering last week. 

"The great thing about this fellowship is its flexibility to go chase a really good idea to wherever it leads,” said Orr, a Stanford University professor. “It is an incredibly valuable fund and gives the researchers an opportunity to take off with a good idea instead of waiting a year or more for federal money.”

Lekic is now one of five alumni faculty members who have received the award while at this university, and he will be given access to unrestricted funds of $875,000 over a five-year period to support his extensive research on Earth’s inner structure.

Now that a large fund has been granted to his work, he hopes to spend more time plotting the seismic information in graphs and models so that he may better understand the Earth, Lekic said.

Lekic Utilized Seismic Activity to Understand the Earth at a Greater Level

Lekic’s research is based on ground vibration recordings, which he and his students use to detect the scattering of seismic waves across the North American tectonic plate. In conjunction with the National Science Foundation’s EarthScope Facility network, the data is collected from the 49 states and Puerto Rico and makes up about 3.8 million square miles, Lekic said.

Lekic has already used the seismic information to investigate why and how the crust moves over the Earth’s mantle. As of now, the deepest any machine has been able to dig was about 12 kilometers into the Earth’s crust, a minuscle fracture of the roughly 6,730 kilometers it takes to get to the Earth’s core. Using the seismic information helps geologists see the shapes and sizes of the Earth’s layers.

Nearly 2 million data lines fill the screen of Vedran Lekic’s computer every day, each representing seismic waves that are detected from of the more than 1,700 seismic stations around the U.S.

From this data, Lekic is creating a map that will not only cover all 48 contiguous states, Alaska and Puerto Rico, but also dive deep into the Earth’s crust and core.

“We are both interested in the energy that moves the tectonic plates and creates the magnetic shield around the planet,” geology professor William McDonough said.

Lekic and McDonough are attempting to harness that energy to create another way to build a model of the Earth.

“What we do is comparable to how an ultrasound let’s us see through our bodies,” Lekic said. “But this lets us see through the Earth.”

“It sounds magical; it’s like a particle that exists but you can’t really see,” Lekic said of neutrinos.

The Recent Discovery of the Neutrino Has Also Sparked Further Research for Lekic

Other than his seismology research contributions, Lekic is also a forerunner in the new geological field of neutrino geoscience.

 Neutrinos are a type of electrically neutral subatomic particle that are created during radioactive decay or some kinds of nuclear reactions. The particle, which was only discovered geologically in 2005 and physically detected for the first time last year, moves through every kind of object, McDonough said

“EarthScope is kind of like our Apollo mission, but not as costly,” Lekic said

Domestic Violence Has Had an Influential Impact on Employee Policies in American Workplaces

In the news story that I discovered, the rise of attention towards the issue of domestic violence in the United States has impacted the workplace, specifically the lack of anti-violence policies found in the workplace. The lack of such policies are becoming increasingly apparent and are causing employers to take action against this issue rather than assuming that their employees are always copacetic.

In The United States, The Way In Which News Is Accessed Is Shifting Towards The Use of Mobile Apps and Social Media

By Robert64 and David30

In today's day and age, locating news via social networks and apps on smartphones and tablets are becoming increasingly common among all age groups in the U.S. With the growth in gaining news in this manner, people are shifting away from standard personal computers and mobile communication is becoming more prevalent.

The Majority of Social Media Platforms Have Solid Percentages of News Sources

Over the years, news has transitioned from old-fashioned access from television and newspapers to mobile systems to the point where people are gradually using social networks for news. Studies have shown that over a third of Facebook users, which is the largest social network in the United States, use Facebook for news access. In addition, other social networks like YouTube, Twitter, and Google+ close or more than a third of users using the network to access news. 

The Top Social Networks in the United States Are Widely Used For News

The top social networks used in the United States by all age groups are Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Although their percentages are fairly small, it shows a trend that an increase of news engagers are engaging in news through mobile channels. 

Many People Are Exposed to News Through Friends OnlineTraditionally, when a person was exposed to news it was either directly from a news outlet or simply through word of mouth. But, in today's world, word of mouth has taken on a whole new meaning. With the rising prevalence of social networking and email, more people than ever are hearing about news through their friends. Before social networks, traditional news outlets dominated the news industry. Majority of Americans and people around the world were exposed to current events by watching tv or hearing about them on the radio, but this has changed dramatically. Sharing through social networking and email is revolutionizing the news industry and how we are exposed to current events. 

Traditional News Outlets Now Have Serious Competition