Smoking Reinforced By Marketing
Leading mood disorder treatment clinic Bridges to Recovery and Los Angeles based PR firm LUCID Public Relations cooperated in a campaign against smoking – they analyzed a variety of marketing materials for and against smoking and were able to confirm what has been known for decades: subliminal advertising works, but it’s not all suggestion.
Certainly marketing executives have known for some time that repetitive suggestions work, but now the science backs this up.
Brain scans of people trying to quit smoking taken before and after viewing photographs of other smoking showed that was stimulation in the dorsal striatum area. The studies were conducted in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center.
That part of the brain is known to be involved with learned habits, and abilities that become rote behaviors. Positive examples are driving a car, riding a bike, or brushing one’s teeth. It is also the area which is affected deter mentally by Alzheimer’s disease.
According to the researcher Joseph McClernon, “Only five percent of unaided quit attempts result in successful abstinence. Most smokers who try to quit return to smoking again. We are trying to understand how that process works in the brain, and this research brings us one step closer.”
This is counter to the common ‘will-power’ argument which smokers have had to endure for decades. It may also be one of the reasons it is harder to quit now than ever before.
With media everywhere today, it’s almost impossible to avoid all images of smokers and smoking. It’s seen in movies, in magazines, on kiosks, and occasionally on buses or subways. Even the now infamous smoking camel cartoon is etched in most people’s memories. For those attempting to quit smoking, reminders are everywhere, thus triggering the dorsal striatum.
Some smokers have reported being distracted by Internet ads, especially those that flash repeatedly.
His co-author, Jed Rode, director of the Duck Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research conducted a previous study. In that, participants wore a nicotine patch and smoked a cigarette without nicotine to break the learned behavior.
“The smoking behavior is not reinforced, because the act of smoking is not leading them to get the nicotine,” Rose said. In other words, smoking a non-nicotine cigarette didn’t produce the same results, therefore the behavior pattern stopped.
When trying to stop smoking, it is important to be aware of all these factors, and have positive support around. Negative feedback from friends and family members only adds to the stress, and coupled with the bombardment of images and photographs, cause most smokers slip back into old behaviors. This cycle continues, which is why more health care professionals advocate the use of some sort of aid instead of the cold turkey approach. Breaking the habit is harder if the eye sees the image and relates it back to the part of the brain, which is trained to trigger a certain response.
“So, if we’re really going to help people quit, this emphasizes the need to do more than tell people to resist temptation. We also have to help them break the habitual response,” McClernon concluded.
Both researchers are continuing their studies at Duke University, and have contributed their findings to news organizations.