So when we're talking about perception, we have to address what I think of as the elephant in the room. And what I mean here is the topic of subliminal perception. This refers to a stimulus that's below the level of the consumers conscious awareness. And as you probably know, this is a topic that has captivated consumers for many, many years, at least close to 70 years by my account. One of the earliest so called examples of subliminal perception was a controversy that occurred way back in the 1950s. When a few people spread the I guess you could say conspiracy theory, that very, very subtle messages were being embedded in the movies that we saw at movie theaters.
So for example, people believed that Coco cola was embedding a message like this drink Coca Cola, eat popcorn as a way to sell more of its product. So this topic has captivated the public for many, many years, despite the fact that there's virtually no proof that this process has any effect at all on consumer behavior. However, this belief persists even today. So a recent survey of American consumers found that almost two thirds of them believe that companies are still practicing subliminal advertising. In addition, respondents to this survey believed or at least more than half of them did, that this technique can get them to buy things they really don't want. One of the most common culprits is the everyday ice cube.
So people love to believe that That when you have a picture of ice cubes and an advertisement that includes some kind of ambiguous lines and shapes in them. In reality, these are m beds. these are these are forming letters, for example, or pictures of naked women and compelling us to do all kinds of crazy things. Are marketers trying to use subliminal techniques to get us to do things we don't want? Well, I can't say for sure that this technique has never been tried. But I can give you a short answer in terms of whether it actually works.
It doesn't work. There is simply no evidence for it at all. And there are a number of reasons for this. One important reason is that among consumers, there are wide differences in threshold levels. That is, some of us are much better able to perceive very subtle stimuli than our others. And advertisers lack control over the consumers distance and position from a movie screen, for example.
There are many other reasons as well, but I guess on this one, you'll just have to trust me. We do a much better job of trying to persuade people, when we go out of our way to devise stimuli that are going to get their attention, rather than those that aren't