Yahoo Movies 
Eating popcorn makes cinema-goers immune to adverts
Study turns up strange side effect to cinema snack.
Eating popcorn makes cinema-goers immune to advertising, claims a new report.
Always a controversial snack of choice at the pictures, it appears its consumption could also be controversial for the people trying to sell us things before the main feature.
According to researchers at Cologne University, the issue comes when new brands are hoping to implant connections with their names in our heads during commercials.
When exposed to new names, our brains try to stimulate the pronunciation automatically and undetectably with our mouths and tongue.
[Lily Collins the most dangerous star search]
When eating, however, this process appears to be interrupted.
A test of the theory, reported in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, took 96 people who were invited to watch a movie and the preceding ads, with half being given free and regularly replenished popcorn and the other half given a sugar cube which dissolved quickly in their mouths.
They were then shown ads unfamiliar to the German market place.
When the participants were tested one week later, the ads shown appeared to receive no psychological response from those who ate popcorn through the ads, compared to the positive psychological responses from those who had not.
“Particularly for novel brands, excessive exposure and repetition is necessary to establish the brand name in the first place,” the study states.
“Remember your initial irritation upon encountering the names Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia for the first time; now they are imprinted in your brain.”
[Man arrested for slapping noisy child in cinema]
“The mundane activity of eating popcorn made participants immune to the pervasive effects of advertising,”said Sascha Topolinski, one of the project's researchers.
“This finding suggests that selling candy in cinemas actually undermines advertising effects, which contradicts present marketing strategies.
“In the future, when promoting a novel brand, advertising clients might consider trying to prevent candy being sold before the main movie.”
Whether such recommendations will please cinema owners is unlikely, however.
A mark-up of around 900% is usually found with the sale of popcorn.
Do you eat popcorn at the cinema? Or can't you stand it...? Let us know...
Check out the latest trailers from Yahoo! UK Movies below...
