Buying In - (Page 53) buying in 53 feedback about ad campaign possibilities.) Then—in an interesting variation on the Pepsi Challenge—they were given several juice samples and asked to identify which was the one they had tried earlier. Finally, they were asked to describe the taste of Orange Grove. Among those not exposed to advertising, about half were able to correctly identify which juice they had tried earlier. Those who had been exposed to ads turned out to be a good deal less reliable—only about a quarter of them picked right. More striking is the way in which most of them were wrong: After seeing the ad materials, they frequently picked out a juice that was better than the one they’d actually tried. That is, their memory of their sensual experience was, evidently, shaped by advertising. One participant who had tasted “the vinegartinged salty orange water,” and was in the group that did not look at ads, called the stuff “terrible . . . bitter and watereddown.” Another subject, who drank the same liquid but did see the ad material, recalled it this way: “It tasted real sweet. It quenched my thirst. Refreshing.” Braun-LaTour later teamed up with Loftus and a third researcher, Rhiannon Ellis, to take this a step further. At the time, Disney World was running an advertising campaign encouraging Baby Boomers to bring their children to the park, with the general theme “Remember the Magic.” The study asked, What if such a campaign “implanted memories into consumers of things that never happened?” Participants were given lists of twenty typical childhood events and asked to indicate which ones they remembered having happened to them, rating their certainty on a 0–100 scale. One of the items was “Met and shook hands with a favorite TV character at a theme resort.” A week later they came back, and
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