Dove vs. Dodge: Super Bowl Commercials Activate Automatic Masculine Goals
Our goals in life can be activated without our awareness. This unconscious activation of goals results in subsequent behavior aimed at achieving those goals (Uleman & Bargh, 2004). This means that we often are pursuing goals that are important to us, without knowing whether or why we are pursuing them. Marketing, since it’s inception with the advent of sexual reproduction (Reid & Halgren, 2009), has been using the recipe of unconscious goal activation to great success.
Today, our lives are inundated with elegant creative executions of advertising stimuli that tap into our most fundamental human needs to stir our emotional associations with brands. On SuperBowl Sunday, with a captive audience ready to be entertained, the table was set for the unconscious activation of consumer goals by brands looking to embed their message deeply in the consumer subconscious.
