The Power of Hypnosis in Advertising

By Barrie St John

It’s impossible to walk down the street without being bombarded with billboards and signs in shop windows. We may like to think that we aren’t really paying attention to these messages, but we are all influenced by the suggestions fed to us in advertising to some degree. In many ways hypnosis is suggestion and suggestion is hypnosis. Advertisers know this and certainly use it to their advantage.

Some suggestions of course we notice because we look at them directly, but lots of them we don’t notice. For instance, do you remember what was on the last advertising billboard that you passed? You might say no or not remember exactly, but on some level you have taken that information in and processed it. All the suggestions that surround us are meant to get us to buy into an idea, a person, or a company’s product. They work into our minds at an unconscious level, much like suggestions in hypnosis.

The mind tends to work by association, and suggestion also happens to work by association. So to help you associate with the advertisement, the message might be something like “If you buy this, you’ll look as young and look as good as me” or “You’ll be happy and smile like me if you buy this product.” These are positive suggestions, but negative suggestions are at work in advertising as well.

For example, insurance advertising plays highly on the fear element. “If you don’t buy this insurance you might get a victim of theft” or “You could find yourself without money in hard times, and end up homeless.” There are different ways to motivate people through suggestion, some of which play on our emotions quite directly.

Often when I watch TV, it takes me on such an emotional journey. It takes over my reality. My reality becomes whatever I am looking at on the TV. When I am watching a soap opera in my mind I am in there with the people. I am concentrating on the screen and, for a lack of a better description - I am in a hypnotic state. You’re concentrating and excluding outside stimulus, which is quite similar to what occurs in hypnosis.

That’s why TV is a fantastic medium for suggestion and for sales, because people are almost in a state of hypnosis. In fact, eye fixation is a classic way of inducing hypnosis. Even though the use of subliminal suggestions in advertising is somewhat illegal and frowned upon, the suggestions are there and are given in such subtle ways sometimes you might not even notice. They use sound, colour, and association to elicit emotional responses to the material being presented. Your unconscious mind picks up these messages and files them away.

Remember, hypnosis is merely the unconscious acceptance of suggestion.