James Vicary’s Famous Subliminal Movie Theatre Research Study

The most widely known peice of research into subliminal messaging comes from a market researcher called James Vicary.

The study is perhaps most famous as it was one of the first of its kind - a large scale investigation into the power of subliminal messages conducted on the public, but also because of the alarming results.

In 1957 Vicary conducted his research in to subliminal messaging. He used a movie theatre in Fotr Lee, New Jersey, and over a 6 week period he tested subliminal messaging on over 45,000 movie goers.

While the patrons watched a movie (called Picnic) Vicary displayed 2 subliminal messages - on stating “Eat Popcorn” and another stating “Drink Coca-Cola”. The messages were text based subliminal messages and were displayed much faster than the human eye can see - they flashed on the screen for 3/1000s of 1 second - and they were displayed once every 5 seconds.

Results were taken by comparing the current 6 weeks sales of Coca Cola and popcorn to sales figures from the previous 6 weeks. The difference was phenomenal:

• Popcorn sales had risen by 57%
• Coca Cola sales rose by 18.1%

These figures suprised even Vicary himself. At the time the findings caused somewhat of a hysteria, further research started to be done into the influence of subliminal messages, and they were soon banned from being used within advertisements.

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