Week 8 EOC: Subliminal Advertising

                                                        Subliminal Advertising

Looking for a new way to publicize your product? Have you considered implanting suggestions in your current advertising that link your product to sex and power?

The use of subliminal advertising is the perfect way to go about that… The birth of subliminal advertising as we know it dates to 1957 when a market researcher named James Vicary inserted the words "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" into a movie. The words appeared for a single frame, allegedly long enough for the subconscious to pick up, but too short for the viewer to be aware of it. The subliminal ads supposedly created an 18.1% increase in Coke sales and a 57.8% increase in popcorn sales. Many groups have tried to figure out the reason why this accrues. “Thanks to Rapaille, Bostwick and his colleagues now employ a kind of Freudianism Lite in all their market research. “Our theory now is that people express things according to patterns,” he says. “And so, in focus groups, we listen differently. We listen for slips of the tongue. We listen for changes in inflection. We listen for long pauses. We ask, Why  did they pause? Our assumption now is that nothing happens by random chance or accident.” That is what one researcher said on the topic however, nearly 50years ago, sociologist Vance Packard shocked the nation with “The Hidden Persuades”. “A stinging indictment of advertisers’ attempts to massage and mold our inner thoughts, fears and dreams for profit. The slim volume, with its unsettling portraits of slimy “depth men” rooting about in the consumer subconscious, provoked widespread outrage. “We have reached the sad age when minds and not just houses can be broken and entered,” concluded the New Yorker. Thundered the Saturday Evening Post: “The subconscious mind is the most delicate part of the most delicate apparatus in the entire universe … It is not to be smudged, sullied or twisted in order to boost the sales of popcorn or anything else.”  This book went into detail and opened the eyes of many consumers till this day.

In closeing  Dr. Sam Cohen, president of PsychoLogics, also represents this holistic, humanistic breed of hidden persuader was ask what he thought on the topic and reply with, “If Poland Spring is the best prop to help me get rid of bad feelings — which maybe I don’t know how to do so well — aren’t we doing a service, both to the brand and to the consumer? What we’re doing here is we’re making brands more meaningful. Which is helpful, because we don’t all have time for therapy anymore. HMOs make it nearly impossible. And so, from a clinical perspective, brands can be used as a sister, an assistant, in promoting people’s better functioning.”

Week 6 EOC: Rocky Ford- Restoring the Brand

                                                     Rocky Ford Cantaloupe

 

"Two years after cantaloupe were linked to one of the worst foodborne in U.S. history, lawyers have filed a fresh round of lawsuits. Meanwhile, farmers are trying to win back customers after their signature crop was tarred by a broad brush. Only supplied cantaloupes contaminated with the listeria bacteria that killed 33 people and sickened at least 147 more in 28 states in 2011." http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/08/14/211784739/listeria-outbreak-still-haunts-colorados-cantaloupe-growers

 

Week 6 BOC: Tylenol scare of 1982

                                                            Tylenol scare of 1982

“In October of 1982, Tylenol, the leading pain-killer medicine in the United States at the time, faced a tremendous crisis when seven people in Chicago were reported dead after taking extra-strength Tylenol capsules. It was reported that an unknown suspect/s put 65 milligrams of deadly cyanide into Tylenol capsules, 10,000 more than what is necessary to kill a human.”

http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall02/susi/tylenol.htm As soon as Johnson & Johnson figured out the issue with the capsules and the reported deaths, a public announcement was made to warn people about the consumption of the product. The company had to figure out the best way to deal with the problem without destroying their reputation and its most profitable product. “Marketers predicted that the Tylenol brand, which accounted for 17 percent of the company's net income in 1981, would never recover from the sabotage. But only two months later, Tylenol was headed back to the market, this time in tamper-proof packaging and bolstered by an extensive media campaign. A year later, its share of the $1.2 billion analgesic market, which had plunged to 7 percent from 37 percent following the poisoning, had climbed back to 30 percent. “ http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/your-money/23iht-mjj_ed3_.html  What help save Johnson & Johnson save its reputation of the Tylenol products and brand name is that it placed the consumer first and recalled 31 million bottles from the store shelves and offered to replace the already purchased bottles with the safer tablet form free of charge. “It is clear that the media played a huge role in Johnson & Johnson's public relations campaign following the seven deaths by cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. If the company had not fully cooperated with the media, they would have, in turn, received much less positive media coverage. Disapproving coverage by the media could have easily destroyed Tylenol's reputation permanently.  By creating a public relations program that both protected the public interest and was given full support by media institutions in the US, Johnson & Johnson was able to recover quickly and painlessly from possibly the greatest crisis ever to hit the pharmaceutical industry.“ http://www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/TylenolMurders/crisis.html