Popcorn in the cinema: Oral interference sabotages advertising effects

Oct 14, 2013

Advertising uses repetition to increase consumers' preference for brands. Initially, novel brands gain in popularity due to repetition, which increases the likelihood that consumers later buy the brands. Particularly for novel brands, excessive exposure and repetition is necessary to establish the brand name in the first place. Remember your initial irritation upon encountering the names Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia for the first time; now they are imprinted in your brain.




In two field studies, participants were invited to a real movie theater and were presented a block of commercials and a movie later on. The commercials were real commercials for existing products that were, however, foreign to the German participants, for instance, the Skandinavian butter LURPAK and a body lotion from INNISFREE. Crucially, half of the participants received popcorn to eat freely during the cinema session. For them, the mouth was occupied with nibbling and chewing the popcorn so the mouth muscles could not engage in inner speech when watching the ads for the novel brands. The other half of the participants only received a small sugar cube at the beginning of the session so that they also had some sweet taste experience. The sugar cube, however, dissolved quickly in their mouth so that the mouth muscles were free to simulate the pronunciation of the brand names.

In the first study, which involved 96 participants, the participants were invited to the lab one week after the cinema session. They were presented with images of products. Half of these products had been advertised in the cinema session, the other half were completely novel products. Participants were asked to indicate the products that thy likes, and their physiological responses were measured. Those participants who had only received a sugar cube and could thus internally train the brands' articulation demonstrated that there was a clear advertising effect. They preferred advertised over novel products and also showed positive physiological responses of familiarity for advertised products. However, those participants who had eaten popcorn while watching the commercials one week before showed no such advertising effect.

In a second study with another 188 participants, the popcorn procedure and session was also carried out. But this time, participants were asked for real consumer choices one week later. They were given a small amount of money that they should spend on buying a skin lotion and donate to charity. Specifically, they were presented with six different lotions (with different ) and six charity foundations with fictitious names. Three of the lotions and three of the charity foundations had been advertised in the earlier cinema session. Participants who had eaten a sugar chose the advertised more often: they were more likely to buy the advertised lotions and donated their money for the advertised charities. However, the participants who had eaten did not show this effect.

Explore further: The most effective advertising may be when consumers least expect it

More information: Topolinski, S., et al., Popcorn in the cinema: Oral interference sabotages advertising effects, Journal of Consumer Psychology (2013), dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2013.09.008

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User comments : 2

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1 / 5 (1) Oct 14, 2013
I don't know about other people but I've been exposed to the advertising disease so much I've developed near complete immunity. Advertising is not how or why I choose anything. If anything it makes me not buy a lot of things.
not rated yet Oct 29, 2013
From a thumbnail of a figure in the original article, this seems like just another one of those Law of Small Numbers situations. The figure shows that popcorn actually had NO significant effect on "buying an advertised lotion" and only about 12 more controls vs. those with popcorn donated to a charity. Gum was slightly more effective, but I think it's fair to say a posteriori that chewing gum doesn't interfere with the ability to talk as much as eating popcorn does.


This doesn't test the hypothesis about mouth movement, anyway. There could be any number of other explanations for the effect. People feeling guilty about receiving special treatment may be more prone to distraction, for example. And obviously this experiment wasn't blinded at all.

So, worthless. How does this kind of nonsense get published? And how does it attract so much news coverage? There must be a dozen stories about this article in the media.