I'm presently completing an internship with a fashion company. One of my jobs was to create a catalog for our B2B2C costumers. While there is a great deal of design that goes into such a creation there is even more research into the target demographic. Which photos go where, how to introduce the photos and how to talk about the garments so to best reach the costumers in your demographic. Someone could possibly make the best catalog ever, but if it isn't aimed at your target market then you might as well just waist a lot of time and money and resources just chucking your work into the wind. And I'm only scratching the very tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Behavioural marketing is widely used in internet advertisements but it can be found else where, such as my catalog. However, the real power of Behavioural marketing is in the internet where internet behaviour can be tracked and recorded such as browsing and buying habits of consumers to your site or even throughout the internet. Such data is actually collected and sold. This data can then be used to create powerful advertising campaigns that use subliminal advertising like this video clip from the


Subliminal advertising is not new and is now being refined with some pretty hefty calculations and psychological research. With any research there is some argument about whether it actually works or not. The argument against, basically suggests that the information is displayed too quickly for the viewer to process while the argument supporting its effectiveness suggests that the viewer's unconscious brain is recording and processing the information. Those who don't believe in it say, "If the information is unconscious then it is not being processed." I'm not here to start this debate though.

Behavioural marketing and not subliminal advertising actually makes perfect sense. By knowing that your costumers are looking for your product and considering buying it then Behavioural Marketing is only making it easier for the costumers to find and making the educational information more readably available. Behavioural marketing is not reprograming or classically conditioning the consumer like Pavlovian dogs drooling over the next thing to buy. Rather, at this point at least, behavioural marketing is making advertising more convenient for both consumer and seller to find one another.

Can Behavioural Marketing be used to persuade the consumer to buy? Yes and No. It really depends on how suggestible your audience is, and how trusted the seller is. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a communication technique to put the listener into a light trance for greater suggestibility that is growing in popularity especially among politicians. But this would be very hard to do over the internet at least for now, and the listener would have to trust the speaker/advertiser. Derren Brown demonstrates this in practice in the following video.

I would like to leave you with one more video just for fun from Derren Brown where he goes into subliminal adverting with two advertising employees. Like I said, this is not Behavioural marketing by itself, but rather facilitated by Behavioural Marketing.