Thesis (B.S.) Magna Cum Laude--Butler University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 23-24).

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-101).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-202).

This thesis is a study about subliminal messages and consumer attitudes towards the use of product placement as subliminal advertising and their behaviors afterwards. The effects of subliminal advertising have been ambiguous and controversial for a long time. Therefore this thesis was designed to understand consumer attitudes towards the way companies use product placement in movies or TV shows and how it may affect their behaviors by using focus group interviews, and the previous study about consumer attitudes towards product placement were also studied. As for the interviews, the samples from Karlstad University were divided into three groups: the Swedish group, the French group, and the German group; so that the results can be compared in order to see if people from different cultural backgrounds have different points of view. The results showed that most of the participants have the same idea that subliminal advertising is interesting, and as long as the product placement does not ruin the entertainment that they are supposed to get from watching a movie, then the attitude is still positive. The behaviors that can happen the most are talking with friends and looking up for information about products or brands, but the possibility of them to buy those brands are less since it also depends on other factors, such as brand preferences, center of interests, and purchasing power.

Master´s Thesis aims to find the answer to the question whether subliminal advertising is able to influence consumer behaviour and make him to choose the specific product. The first, theoretical part, deals with literature review which focuses on the issue of subliminal advertising. In the second and third part, it concentrates on the description of methodology used in studies of aforementioned topic and definition of statistical methods used for evaluating the experiment. The practical part of the Master´s Thesis concentrates on realisation of the experiment verifying the effects of subliminal advertising. The purpose of the experiment was to determine if pictorial subliminal priming of bottle of specific brand of mineral water is able to influence the choice of consumer. Experiment was conducted on students of University of Economics, Prague and consisted of subliminal priming of participants by Poděbradka bottle. Afterwards it was investigated whether participants, opposed to those who were not subliminally primed, chose subliminally primed mineral water in the higher extent. The experiment determined that subliminal advertising of brand of specific mineral water did not affected the choice of participants and their intention to drink this mineral water. At the end, Master´s Thesis indicates limitations of conducted experiment and recommends alignment for the future research.