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For a logo to hijack our brains and hearts through pre-attentive processing (those things we see in the corner of our eye), we require multiple exposures to the stimulus. Chatterjee has found this unconscious, positive association to occur within 23 exposures, but she believes it could probably happen in even fewer. “When consumers process any stimulus--a logo is a brand stimulus--implicitly it only creates a weak memory trace. The weak memory trace by itself can’t really change behavior, Chatterjee explains. “But over multiple exposures, those weak memory traces start to become stronger.” “The consumer is unaware that those memory traces exist. Let’s take John and Jane Doe looking at an ultrasound. They’re looking at a picture, they’re oohing and ahhing, showing it to their friends, talking about it, putting it in a scrapbook. They’re focusing on the baby. They may not even know it’s an ultrasound made by a GE machine, but they see it multiple times.” “Then, maybe they’re buying a new house, and so they’re buying appliances, they go to a big-box store, they’re looking at multiple brands. It is quite conceivable they will be more attracted to the GE brands."

for this long con to work, the logo has to be identical everywhere I see it.

The other catch, maybe the most important catch of all when working in unconscious branding, is that the consumer can’t recognize they’re being manipulated, or very bad things happen.

In a 2010 study conducted by Harvard professor Bharat Anand, and Alezander Rosinski, they examined how the power of ads are influenced by the magazine or newspaper they appear in. By placing the same ad in the respected Economist and perhaps the less respected Huffington Post, they discovered that the more respected the publication, the more people would trust and recall the ad

As part of the experiment we'd asked our test family to adopt an environmentally conscious behavior. To assist them in this endeavor, we brought in experts to advise the family on changing their patterns of consumption. They taught them how to recycle and conserve. We wanted to see if it was possible to effect change amongst hundreds of families' daily routine by introducing new behaviors at the highest levels of trust--from the experts down. In other words, could a single family's environmentally conscious behavior set the standard for their social circle and thus create widespread change? The answer was a clear and resounding "Yes!" Close to 31% of the thousands of people affected by the experimental family changed their recycling and conserving habits.

Deep trust is communicated subconsciously. It's rarely expressed explicitly, nor is imparted loudly or didactically. To trust deeply not only can change our minds, but it has the power to alter our most ingrained behaviors. It's a subtle emotion that the average commercial message fails to embody