How marketing stimuli unconsciously activate self-control

The author investigates whether buying impulsiveness, the situational context and gender have an effect on the automatic and unconscious activation of control goals such as "saving" (demonstrating the activation of self-control) via marketing stimuli such as the names of popular commercial chains. Thus, he extends the work of Fishbach, Friedman and Kruglanski (2003) and conveys their findings into the marketing context. Data comes from one hundred and one participants who completed several self-control related questionnaires and underwent a Lexical Decision Task. Men took significantly longer to identify control goals as correct words when being primed with marketing stimuli compared to when being primed with irrelevant primes. In women, however, exactly the opposite pattern emerged. Additionally, higher general self-control led to a faster recognition of control goals as correct words, replicating Fishbach et al.’s (2003) findings.