What do you think?
Rate this book
The Hidden Persuaders
"In this book you'll discover a world of phsychology professors...."
275 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1957
199 people are currently reading
5942 people want to read
About the author
Vance Packard
102 books56 followersVance Oakley Packard was an American journalist and social critic. He was the author of several books, including The Hidden Persuaders and The Naked Society. He was a critic of consumerism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews
October 8, 2010
This slim volume, already more than half a century old, remains readable and relevant today, despite largely preaching to the converted about a war that's already been lost.
Its thesis is simple: sometime before the midpoint of the 20th Century, American advertisers began appropriating techniques from the burgeoning fields of psychology and sociology to manipulate us as consumers of goods and services, religions and politics, to a great extent without our knowledge or consent. The effects of such manipulation were already pervasive and insidious even at the time Packard was writing, and have only grown more so since.
Packard makes a good case, filled with telling anecdotes drawn from trade magazines and interviews with advertising industry insiders. The Hidden Persuaders is written in a clear, accessible prose style—assertive, but not at all rigorous. A Wikipedian would constantly be crying "citation needed"—as the introduction to this 50th-anniversary edition by Mark Crispin Miller mentions, this book is devoid of footnotes, endnotes and bibliography. It's a polemic, intended to awaken the hypnotized masses, not a scholarly analysis with an audience of several dozen.
Unfortunately, the edition I read was also abysmally proofread; I believe it might have been scanned and OCR'd (run through optical character recognition software), and possibly spell-checked, from the types of error that remained... but surely no human proofreader of any competence would have missed so many mistakes, especially late in the book. Page 144, for one example, uses "church" for "churn," and the phrase "a large number women" is missing its "of." Page 205 coins the odd portmanteau word "fundraiobably" (for "fundraisers probably," I'm sure), and on page 201, the phrase "pubic-relations men" actually puts in an appearance! I but skim the surface of the solecisms in this edition... if this is the kind of thing that grates on you, you may wish to seek out an earlier release of this work.
The Hidden Persuaders was enormously persuasive in its time... it's sold millions of copies since its original publication. Yet I found Packard's perspective severely dated, almost a time capsule of the 1950s in America. I found myself wondering, What Would Packard Buy—what were his brand loyalties? There's little hint of them in the case he makes; he skewers the very idea of the consumer culture liberally, but without bringing any personal perspective into the argument. I wondered whether Packard was himself a cigarette smoker; his repeated dismissive references to "the lung cancer scare" began to sound a little defensive after awhile. And then there's the constant gender stereotyping... the distinction between what aimless "housewives" want to buy, now that they're bereft of purpose due to their labor-saving devices, and the expensive objects their breadwinning husbands bring home, is simply accepted, both by Packard and by the sources of his information.
In other places, though, it must be said that Packard's observations seem as deadly accurate as ever; our national obsession with the size of our automobiles has only recently shown signs of abating, for example, and his jaundiced view of the packaging of politicians makes even more sense now than when our leaders were still innocently deciding what color their televised chairs should be and whether the President's eyeglasses made him look too pale.
At the end of the day, and despite its significant flaws when looked at through modern eyes, The Hidden Persuaders is still a landmark analysis, and it's still fun to read.
Its thesis is simple: sometime before the midpoint of the 20th Century, American advertisers began appropriating techniques from the burgeoning fields of psychology and sociology to manipulate us as consumers of goods and services, religions and politics, to a great extent without our knowledge or consent. The effects of such manipulation were already pervasive and insidious even at the time Packard was writing, and have only grown more so since.
Packard makes a good case, filled with telling anecdotes drawn from trade magazines and interviews with advertising industry insiders. The Hidden Persuaders is written in a clear, accessible prose style—assertive, but not at all rigorous. A Wikipedian would constantly be crying "citation needed"—as the introduction to this 50th-anniversary edition by Mark Crispin Miller mentions, this book is devoid of footnotes, endnotes and bibliography. It's a polemic, intended to awaken the hypnotized masses, not a scholarly analysis with an audience of several dozen.
Unfortunately, the edition I read was also abysmally proofread; I believe it might have been scanned and OCR'd (run through optical character recognition software), and possibly spell-checked, from the types of error that remained... but surely no human proofreader of any competence would have missed so many mistakes, especially late in the book. Page 144, for one example, uses "church" for "churn," and the phrase "a large number women" is missing its "of." Page 205 coins the odd portmanteau word "fundraiobably" (for "fundraisers probably," I'm sure), and on page 201, the phrase "pubic-relations men" actually puts in an appearance! I but skim the surface of the solecisms in this edition... if this is the kind of thing that grates on you, you may wish to seek out an earlier release of this work.
The Hidden Persuaders was enormously persuasive in its time... it's sold millions of copies since its original publication. Yet I found Packard's perspective severely dated, almost a time capsule of the 1950s in America. I found myself wondering, What Would Packard Buy—what were his brand loyalties? There's little hint of them in the case he makes; he skewers the very idea of the consumer culture liberally, but without bringing any personal perspective into the argument. I wondered whether Packard was himself a cigarette smoker; his repeated dismissive references to "the lung cancer scare" began to sound a little defensive after awhile. And then there's the constant gender stereotyping... the distinction between what aimless "housewives" want to buy, now that they're bereft of purpose due to their labor-saving devices, and the expensive objects their breadwinning husbands bring home, is simply accepted, both by Packard and by the sources of his information.
In other places, though, it must be said that Packard's observations seem as deadly accurate as ever; our national obsession with the size of our automobiles has only recently shown signs of abating, for example, and his jaundiced view of the packaging of politicians makes even more sense now than when our leaders were still innocently deciding what color their televised chairs should be and whether the President's eyeglasses made him look too pale.
At the end of the day, and despite its significant flaws when looked at through modern eyes, The Hidden Persuaders is still a landmark analysis, and it's still fun to read.
Read
April 21, 2018I remember after reading this around 1969 I scruntinized every print ad trying to decipher how it 'worked'. Especially the alcohol ads, which Vance insisted had death heads images secreted in the photos. I never found them.
In high school journalism class we learned about advertising strategies. I was both fascinated and appalled by advertising. Ten years later I was a promotion copywriter and I felt...powerful...lol. Gee whiz, trying to make some boring book marketable to the common reader! Nothing like Madison Avenue and the big bucks but I had a small glimpse.
It is mind boggling what is being done today with the Internet. Ads of something I looked at pop up in the strangest places. But really, Amazon, don't try to sell me books I reviewed!
I am still appalled and fascinated by advertising.
In high school journalism class we learned about advertising strategies. I was both fascinated and appalled by advertising. Ten years later I was a promotion copywriter and I felt...powerful...lol. Gee whiz, trying to make some boring book marketable to the common reader! Nothing like Madison Avenue and the big bucks but I had a small glimpse.
It is mind boggling what is being done today with the Internet. Ads of something I looked at pop up in the strangest places. But really, Amazon, don't try to sell me books I reviewed!
I am still appalled and fascinated by advertising.
January 14, 2023
Published first in 1957, "The Hidden Persuaders" was not merely the work of a topnotch journalist, or even a social critic. Vance Packard was one of America's innovators for consumerism.
Reading this book in high school, I lost a kind of innocence about the benevolence of what was being sold to me; sold to me both literally and figuratively; sold to me by persuaders who were hidden; sold to me by advertisers with no scruples.
Sad and scary, but true: Since then, my former innocence has not returned, either. Why would it?
CAN PRODUCTS REALLY DELIVER ANY OF THESE?
* Emotional Security
* Reassurance of worth
* Ego gratification
* Creative outlets
* Love objects
* Sense of power
* Roots
* Immortality
OF COURSE NOT
So it's up to you and me, Goodreaders; it's up to each of us consumers to foil the advertisers's hidden persuasions.
Reading this book in high school, I lost a kind of innocence about the benevolence of what was being sold to me; sold to me both literally and figuratively; sold to me by persuaders who were hidden; sold to me by advertisers with no scruples.
Sad and scary, but true: Since then, my former innocence has not returned, either. Why would it?
CAN PRODUCTS REALLY DELIVER ANY OF THESE?
* Emotional Security
* Reassurance of worth
* Ego gratification
* Creative outlets
* Love objects
* Sense of power
* Roots
* Immortality
OF COURSE NOT
So it's up to you and me, Goodreaders; it's up to each of us consumers to foil the advertisers's hidden persuasions.
September 29, 2022
fragments about a fave
The New York Times
December 30th 2007
The books a child sneaks off his parents’ bookshelves and surreptitiously reads ought to be sex books. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Memoirs of Hecate County” scandalized and educated earlier generations.
The volume I made off with was a 75-cent paperback of “The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard. It did scandalize me, completely. But it did so by exposing the secret world of advertising and brands.
Packard had tried to warn Americans of a new mutation in advertising. Powerful admen were working to tap the irrational in the consumer mind, using the applied psychology and sociology supported by the government during World War II.
As more goods came to supermarket shelves, advertisers decided they were no longer selling just products, but malleable brand “personalities.”
Decades later, I knew the results. Of course Coke was the red wholesomeness of tradition and majority taste, and Pepsi was the younger, blue, less popular choice of a rebellious new generation!
My 14-year-old self was sure of it.
Packard had lived on the cusp of two eras, and what fascinated me as a teenage reader was how close in time he had been to the invention of brands that seemed as solid and permanent to me as trees and stones.
Marlboro, the essence of macho, had first been a women’s cigarette, “lipstick red and ivory tipped.” Advertisers managed to push it into a male market while holding on to its previous customers through ad campaigns of “rugged, virile-looking men” (like the famous cowboy) whom, studies proved, women liked too.
Packard traced how products like gasoline and detergent, so standardized and reliable in the 1950s, needed to develop “personalities” to survive. I, for one, knew I was a Mobil guy long before I ever got my learner’s permit, though I had no idea why.
The bête noire of “The Hidden Persuaders” was “motivational research.”
Rather than focusing on products, this “depth” research dug into the psychological weaknesses and needs of consumers. Packard wanted brands to certify purity or quality, to make an old-fashioned fact-based appeal to citizens who had price and effectiveness in mind.
Scientists of motivation, on the other hand, were trying to puzzle out the reasons for impulsive and even self-destructive purchasing, then tailor images and packaging accordingly.
As the 2008 primaries approach, it’s disturbing to see how the novelties Packard deplored have become accepted fundamentals. For 1956, professional advertisers were hired to “swing crucial voters” in “the undecided or listless mass,” trolling for weaknesses in candidates’ images. The “switch voter,” an advertising expert explained after much study, is not a thoughtful “independent” but someone who “switches for some snotty little reason such as not liking the candidate’s wife.”
Whatever its flaws, I’ll keep recommending “The Hidden Persuaders.” For me, it’s the original inoculation against manipulation, and every once in a while —perhaps especially in this political season —one needs to go back for a booster.
The New York Times
December 30th 2007
The books a child sneaks off his parents’ bookshelves and surreptitiously reads ought to be sex books. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Memoirs of Hecate County” scandalized and educated earlier generations.
The volume I made off with was a 75-cent paperback of “The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard. It did scandalize me, completely. But it did so by exposing the secret world of advertising and brands.
Packard had tried to warn Americans of a new mutation in advertising. Powerful admen were working to tap the irrational in the consumer mind, using the applied psychology and sociology supported by the government during World War II.
As more goods came to supermarket shelves, advertisers decided they were no longer selling just products, but malleable brand “personalities.”
Decades later, I knew the results. Of course Coke was the red wholesomeness of tradition and majority taste, and Pepsi was the younger, blue, less popular choice of a rebellious new generation!
My 14-year-old self was sure of it.
Packard had lived on the cusp of two eras, and what fascinated me as a teenage reader was how close in time he had been to the invention of brands that seemed as solid and permanent to me as trees and stones.
Marlboro, the essence of macho, had first been a women’s cigarette, “lipstick red and ivory tipped.” Advertisers managed to push it into a male market while holding on to its previous customers through ad campaigns of “rugged, virile-looking men” (like the famous cowboy) whom, studies proved, women liked too.
Packard traced how products like gasoline and detergent, so standardized and reliable in the 1950s, needed to develop “personalities” to survive. I, for one, knew I was a Mobil guy long before I ever got my learner’s permit, though I had no idea why.
The bête noire of “The Hidden Persuaders” was “motivational research.”
Rather than focusing on products, this “depth” research dug into the psychological weaknesses and needs of consumers. Packard wanted brands to certify purity or quality, to make an old-fashioned fact-based appeal to citizens who had price and effectiveness in mind.
Scientists of motivation, on the other hand, were trying to puzzle out the reasons for impulsive and even self-destructive purchasing, then tailor images and packaging accordingly.
As the 2008 primaries approach, it’s disturbing to see how the novelties Packard deplored have become accepted fundamentals. For 1956, professional advertisers were hired to “swing crucial voters” in “the undecided or listless mass,” trolling for weaknesses in candidates’ images. The “switch voter,” an advertising expert explained after much study, is not a thoughtful “independent” but someone who “switches for some snotty little reason such as not liking the candidate’s wife.”
Whatever its flaws, I’ll keep recommending “The Hidden Persuaders.” For me, it’s the original inoculation against manipulation, and every once in a while —perhaps especially in this political season —one needs to go back for a booster.
July 11, 2011
The Hidden Persuaders was first published in 1957 and is one of the first popular books to describe the psychological techniques advertisers and marketers use to sell their wares. While these techniques have only become more sophisticated in the half century since the book was written, the themes are still highly relevant.
Written in a lively and readable style, the book is both informative and highly entertaining. With quotes from ad-men like:
“You have to have a carton that attracts and hypnotizes this woman, like waving a flashlight in front of her eyes.”
“All cultures have expressed basic needs for oral comfort by some form of smoking or sucking. The deeply ingrained need for intake through the mouth arose originally as a reaction to hunger and tension in the infant, who was pacified at the breast or with a bottle. This need became modified but remains as a primary impulse and need all through adult life … Smoking in general serves to relieve tension, impatience, anger, frustration – just as sucking does to the infant.”
“People with extreme B.O. are extremely angry or hostile people. Their B.O. is a defense mechanism. They fear attack.”
“Many men have tried to change the conduct of people by reasonings, or by passing certain laws. Their endeavors have often been particularly barren of results. People must be controlled by manipulating their [instincts and emotions] rather than by changing their reasonings.”
Regardless of the psychological validity of these analysis’ (and I think there is more than a little), they are hilarious! They also illustrate the techniques used on a daily basis by persuaders of all stripes to attempt to trigger subconscious emotions to get us to do something. Perhaps something we wouldn’t otherwise do had we recognized that we were being manipulated.
On a side note – the book has an abundance of typos. It could really stand the services of a good proof reader.
Written in a lively and readable style, the book is both informative and highly entertaining. With quotes from ad-men like:
“You have to have a carton that attracts and hypnotizes this woman, like waving a flashlight in front of her eyes.”
“All cultures have expressed basic needs for oral comfort by some form of smoking or sucking. The deeply ingrained need for intake through the mouth arose originally as a reaction to hunger and tension in the infant, who was pacified at the breast or with a bottle. This need became modified but remains as a primary impulse and need all through adult life … Smoking in general serves to relieve tension, impatience, anger, frustration – just as sucking does to the infant.”
“People with extreme B.O. are extremely angry or hostile people. Their B.O. is a defense mechanism. They fear attack.”
“Many men have tried to change the conduct of people by reasonings, or by passing certain laws. Their endeavors have often been particularly barren of results. People must be controlled by manipulating their [instincts and emotions] rather than by changing their reasonings.”
Regardless of the psychological validity of these analysis’ (and I think there is more than a little), they are hilarious! They also illustrate the techniques used on a daily basis by persuaders of all stripes to attempt to trigger subconscious emotions to get us to do something. Perhaps something we wouldn’t otherwise do had we recognized that we were being manipulated.
On a side note – the book has an abundance of typos. It could really stand the services of a good proof reader.
July 7, 2012
An important book in the history of advertising. Dated, yes, but not really if you start digging into what's going on now with "MR" as it was called then. The book was a massive public hit, and changed america's view of advertising forever. It was influential in bringing some laws and regulations to things such as advertising to children, etc. That spotlight, however, caused many of the researchers to go deeper underground and stay more hidden. The techniques are dated, the science has modernized, but the desires and motivations of MR have not flagged.
Of course, then as now, much of the ad world doesn't buy into it. Ogilvy notoriously belittled the techniques Packard exposed here, and if you go read any AdAge article about current advertising MRI research, etc. you'll see many of today's advertising luminaries raising the same objections. They are still sound.
Today, we all know that advertisers go to great lengths to divine our inner soul. This is the book that brought that to our attention, and it's still a great read.
Of course, then as now, much of the ad world doesn't buy into it. Ogilvy notoriously belittled the techniques Packard exposed here, and if you go read any AdAge article about current advertising MRI research, etc. you'll see many of today's advertising luminaries raising the same objections. They are still sound.
Today, we all know that advertisers go to great lengths to divine our inner soul. This is the book that brought that to our attention, and it's still a great read.
September 12, 2017
Intriguing read, because at the time, consumer manipulation was only just beginning. There is a glimpse into a world before mass persuasion was the norm.
I slightly wonder at the conclusion though... just letting people know that they're being manipulated was not going to arm them against the onslaught of P.R. as we now know.
The methods at the time had one big flaw.... one section of the population never made it into the data bases: the ones who didn't like divulging information. Nowadays the data is wrenched from you, whether you like it or not. There seems to be only one way to protect oneself: not having money to spend.
I slightly wonder at the conclusion though... just letting people know that they're being manipulated was not going to arm them against the onslaught of P.R. as we now know.
The methods at the time had one big flaw.... one section of the population never made it into the data bases: the ones who didn't like divulging information. Nowadays the data is wrenched from you, whether you like it or not. There seems to be only one way to protect oneself: not having money to spend.
July 5, 2022
Years before Naomi Klein wrote her No Logo, Vance Packard wrote of the way in which marketers were employing the findings of psychology in order to market more aggressively to consumers. For most contemporary readers, this is probably an instance of a conspiracy theory that is no longer a theory nor a secret.
Acquired Aug 28, 2006
P.T. Campbell Bookseller, London, Ontario
Acquired Aug 28, 2006
P.T. Campbell Bookseller, London, Ontario
July 31, 2025
“Capitalism is dead – consumerism is king!”
Informed by the likes of pioneers like Edward Bernays and later to go on and influence the likes of J Douglas Edwards’ “Cashing Objections” and reflected and portrayed all too well in “Mad Men” in the 21st Century. Vance Packard’s book remains a hugely entertaining and informative read nearly 70 years later and has dated only in small, largely insignificant ways and proves to be hugely important today.
"We don’t sell lipstick, we buy customers.”
The United States came out of WWII stronger than ever, and overall the war proved to be one of the shrewdest business decisions it ever pulled off. By the time the 1950s came round the US had firmly established itself as the world’s strongest economy with the most wealthiest population, more people than ever were getting better educated and millions were actually in careers rather than jobs, with proper benefits and earning good money and better treatment than previous generations. Many could see that this new class of people were enjoying more disposable income and so they saw opportunities in helping them spend that extra cash, they would turn them into consumers.
“Leisure could solve the ‘greatest peril’ in our economy, the danger of production outrunning consumption.”
Enter the psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists etc. They would collude with the corporate world for often exorbitant fees to create new ideas of status, aspiration and wealth so that the American public would not just be consuming products, but ideas, dreams and myths.
These were routinely placed above the old, established ideas – in short greed took the place of need. They would achieve this by digging deep into the human mind, and after spending millions and many years of research they would use this knowledge to cynically exploit and play on our darkest fears, deepest insecurities and wildest dreams, creating a new world which sold us the illusion that all of our problems could be solved, all of our needs could be met and all of our dreams could come true if only we bought that next, new shiny thing they are selling us.
“The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat.”
Short, palatable chapters written in clear, accessible language which reveal many profound and shocking truths about the dark arts which were just beginning to come into their own. We learn about many of the techniques used, the likes of so called depth probing and subthreshold stimulation, such as conspicuous reserve through deliberate downgrading or the case of flashing ice cream during a movie at a cinema in New Jersey. We learn about the likes of Ernest Dichter who was charging $500 a day for his services and that was in the 1950s. We find out who Mrs Middle Majority is.
“When you are manipulating, where do you stop? Who is to fix the point at which manipulative attempts become socially undesirable?”
This book is absolutely fascinating in many places. Its far more detailed and developed than Bernays published works, which read more like cold bullet points, whereas this is more warm, refined and informative. We should keep in mind too the wider political and social landscape this book first came out in, the same decade where you could find adverts with doctors selling you the health benefits of smoking cigarettes, the cold war was in full swing, McCarthyism scaring the nation into a dark, paranoid state as the Americans fully embraced the atomic age. This is essential reading, so do yourself a favour and read it.
Informed by the likes of pioneers like Edward Bernays and later to go on and influence the likes of J Douglas Edwards’ “Cashing Objections” and reflected and portrayed all too well in “Mad Men” in the 21st Century. Vance Packard’s book remains a hugely entertaining and informative read nearly 70 years later and has dated only in small, largely insignificant ways and proves to be hugely important today.
"We don’t sell lipstick, we buy customers.”
The United States came out of WWII stronger than ever, and overall the war proved to be one of the shrewdest business decisions it ever pulled off. By the time the 1950s came round the US had firmly established itself as the world’s strongest economy with the most wealthiest population, more people than ever were getting better educated and millions were actually in careers rather than jobs, with proper benefits and earning good money and better treatment than previous generations. Many could see that this new class of people were enjoying more disposable income and so they saw opportunities in helping them spend that extra cash, they would turn them into consumers.
“Leisure could solve the ‘greatest peril’ in our economy, the danger of production outrunning consumption.”
Enter the psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists etc. They would collude with the corporate world for often exorbitant fees to create new ideas of status, aspiration and wealth so that the American public would not just be consuming products, but ideas, dreams and myths.
These were routinely placed above the old, established ideas – in short greed took the place of need. They would achieve this by digging deep into the human mind, and after spending millions and many years of research they would use this knowledge to cynically exploit and play on our darkest fears, deepest insecurities and wildest dreams, creating a new world which sold us the illusion that all of our problems could be solved, all of our needs could be met and all of our dreams could come true if only we bought that next, new shiny thing they are selling us.
“The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat.”
Short, palatable chapters written in clear, accessible language which reveal many profound and shocking truths about the dark arts which were just beginning to come into their own. We learn about many of the techniques used, the likes of so called depth probing and subthreshold stimulation, such as conspicuous reserve through deliberate downgrading or the case of flashing ice cream during a movie at a cinema in New Jersey. We learn about the likes of Ernest Dichter who was charging $500 a day for his services and that was in the 1950s. We find out who Mrs Middle Majority is.
“When you are manipulating, where do you stop? Who is to fix the point at which manipulative attempts become socially undesirable?”
This book is absolutely fascinating in many places. Its far more detailed and developed than Bernays published works, which read more like cold bullet points, whereas this is more warm, refined and informative. We should keep in mind too the wider political and social landscape this book first came out in, the same decade where you could find adverts with doctors selling you the health benefits of smoking cigarettes, the cold war was in full swing, McCarthyism scaring the nation into a dark, paranoid state as the Americans fully embraced the atomic age. This is essential reading, so do yourself a favour and read it.
December 15, 2017
"I persuasori occulti" di Vance Packard, saggio sui nuovi metodi di comunicazione pubblicitaria edito per la prima volta nei lontani anni cinquanta, malgrado l'evidente obsolescenza mediatica conserva un grande interesse per la capire la grande capacità di manipolazione psicologica dei mass media e delle agenzie pubblicitarie in particolare. Questo libro, all'epoca della prima uscita rivoluzionario, ci fa capire che quando acquistiamo qualsiasi cosa, non la compriamo per il suo essere intrinseco ma per il suo valore accessorio. Se ho necessità di un'automobile vengo suggestionato dalla pubblicità che mi suggerisce subliminalmente che pagando x per la macchina y non compro solo una vettura ma contestualmente acquisto anche prestigio, potenza e anche, perché no, anche sex appeal.
Quando la strategia pubblicitaria incontrò la psicologia il consumismo divenne il fattore imprescindibile della crescita economica e sociale nell'America del dopoguerra e questo saggio analizza con rigore questo fenomeno, di interesse principale alla classe affluente in prima battuta ma che poi avrebbe riguardato tutti gli strati sociali della popolazione americana prima e mondiale in un secondo momento.
Dopo la rinascita economica derivata dalla Seconda Guerra Mondiale e dall'euforia derivatane negli USA si pose il problema della continuazione del boom economico e i grandi gruppi industriali si ingegnarono a creare i bisogni dell'uomo moderno teso a raggiungere le "magnifiche sorti e progressive delle umane genti." Plasmando la psiche del consumatore queste industrie, sostenute dalla grande capacità intuitiva dei "persuasori occulti" crearono i "bisogni" dei cittadini comuni offrendo loro assieme alla merce che compravano, anche i sogni che popolavono la mentalità profonda, scrutata e codificata dai nuovi pifferai magici. Scritto in un epoca in cui la televisione non era così pervasiva come oggi questo saggio conserva un grandissimo interesse per il suo valore di testimonianza storica e per la sua preveggenza sull'aspetto psicologico della proposta politica a dispetto dell'interesse generale. Che un'idea sociale oppure un tema politico potesse essere "venduto" come una saponetta o un deodorante poteva sembrare un'eresia negli anni cinquanta ma ora abbiamo tutti capito che è un concetto con cui fare in conti tutti i giorni.
Benché superato dall'inarrestabile avanzare del tempo è un testo da consigliare.
Quando la strategia pubblicitaria incontrò la psicologia il consumismo divenne il fattore imprescindibile della crescita economica e sociale nell'America del dopoguerra e questo saggio analizza con rigore questo fenomeno, di interesse principale alla classe affluente in prima battuta ma che poi avrebbe riguardato tutti gli strati sociali della popolazione americana prima e mondiale in un secondo momento.
Dopo la rinascita economica derivata dalla Seconda Guerra Mondiale e dall'euforia derivatane negli USA si pose il problema della continuazione del boom economico e i grandi gruppi industriali si ingegnarono a creare i bisogni dell'uomo moderno teso a raggiungere le "magnifiche sorti e progressive delle umane genti." Plasmando la psiche del consumatore queste industrie, sostenute dalla grande capacità intuitiva dei "persuasori occulti" crearono i "bisogni" dei cittadini comuni offrendo loro assieme alla merce che compravano, anche i sogni che popolavono la mentalità profonda, scrutata e codificata dai nuovi pifferai magici. Scritto in un epoca in cui la televisione non era così pervasiva come oggi questo saggio conserva un grandissimo interesse per il suo valore di testimonianza storica e per la sua preveggenza sull'aspetto psicologico della proposta politica a dispetto dell'interesse generale. Che un'idea sociale oppure un tema politico potesse essere "venduto" come una saponetta o un deodorante poteva sembrare un'eresia negli anni cinquanta ma ora abbiamo tutti capito che è un concetto con cui fare in conti tutti i giorni.
Benché superato dall'inarrestabile avanzare del tempo è un testo da consigliare.
July 23, 2012
For anyone born in the mid-twentieth century, The Hidden Persuaders is an intriguing look at the beginnings of advertising and marketing as it influenced our wants and needs, our purchasing decisions, our political views and even (possibly a stretch) led to our current economic situation. I read it as research for my memoir. I was 10 years old when it came out and I remember my dad talking about the book.
Some people call Vance Packard the first Malcolm Gladwell. I have not read Gladwell because I had the idea that he was a sociology-light sort of guy, but perhaps now I will check out one of his books. Packard's book opened my eyes to a sinister trend in which we all participate.
I already knew that after World War II, when American industry was at peak production due to the demands of war, manufacturers needed new markets for products. The answer was to get the American public to consume like never before. The obstacles were our Puritan background and the effects of the Great Depression, both of which created habits of making do on less, making things last and living simply.
So retail sales people and advertising agencies teamed up with psychiatry to use our deepest wants, fears, and insecurities as motivations that would get us to buy stuff. "Planned obsolescence" (you know: you feel you must have the latest smart phone, tablet, car, appliances, not to mention fashion) has led us to a practically obsolete planet.
Though the reprint I read had ridiculous amounts of typos and though Packard's style is pretty dry, it was quite a sobering read.
March 8, 2018
The Hidden Persuaders is not a new book but it is definitely a classic. I do not know if the book has been updated to include changes in recent decades (e.g. e-commerce and digital advertising), its basic premise of how consumers are manipulated, the various methods companies use to get their message across and get us to buy what they want, and the psychological underpinnings are still valid today. In any case, an important work which throws light on what we as people are subject to, and despite claims of quality, sustainability, being in the public interest etc, we see what companies are motivated by and how they try to achieve their goals.
March 19, 2017
This 1957 book is about the growing field of manipulating people from buying products to politicians.
It was no doubt referenced in creating the show Mad Men, and is still frighteningly applicable today. I've always wondered why marketing and advertising techniques weren't taught in high school to make people aware of the subtle, or not so subtle, ways of separating people from their money or appealing to tribal groupthink.
Sure, changing a packaging color because it has positive connotations seems perfectly acceptable. What about trying to find a psychological "in" to try and get mothers to feel guilty about not giving their pre-teen daughters permanent waves becUse they will be unattractive and rejected by the group without them.
Persuasion usually falls on fear, insecurity, conforming which rolls up into status. In 1957 they talk identify how people do not think rationally and logically about what they need and therefore do not make rationale decisions. It's also raised the issues of supplanting democracy/citizenship with consumerism. Yet, here we are sixty years later and there has literally been no improvement the understanding or the effete of this change. GWB in his presidency acknowledged the US has to change from a consumer to an ownership society. This aside without a whimper, but that's where the country is going - a great divide is being erected without any democractic forum to discuss better solutions.
In the book it touches on the idea that in the year 2000 there would be biocontrol of people via chip implants. There was talk about chip implants but it never came to fruition. What did happen, however, was that technology advanced from the more public-minded television stations to where we are now: the targeted and narrow marketing of ideas that are filtered via the internet and social media. The centralization the internet has brought has created a further alienation used by marketing and politicians to keep their targets fed on only their version of reality.
It was no doubt referenced in creating the show Mad Men, and is still frighteningly applicable today. I've always wondered why marketing and advertising techniques weren't taught in high school to make people aware of the subtle, or not so subtle, ways of separating people from their money or appealing to tribal groupthink.
Sure, changing a packaging color because it has positive connotations seems perfectly acceptable. What about trying to find a psychological "in" to try and get mothers to feel guilty about not giving their pre-teen daughters permanent waves becUse they will be unattractive and rejected by the group without them.
Persuasion usually falls on fear, insecurity, conforming which rolls up into status. In 1957 they talk identify how people do not think rationally and logically about what they need and therefore do not make rationale decisions. It's also raised the issues of supplanting democracy/citizenship with consumerism. Yet, here we are sixty years later and there has literally been no improvement the understanding or the effete of this change. GWB in his presidency acknowledged the US has to change from a consumer to an ownership society. This aside without a whimper, but that's where the country is going - a great divide is being erected without any democractic forum to discuss better solutions.
In the book it touches on the idea that in the year 2000 there would be biocontrol of people via chip implants. There was talk about chip implants but it never came to fruition. What did happen, however, was that technology advanced from the more public-minded television stations to where we are now: the targeted and narrow marketing of ideas that are filtered via the internet and social media. The centralization the internet has brought has created a further alienation used by marketing and politicians to keep their targets fed on only their version of reality.
April 24, 2015
The classic exposé of advertising. In many ways this book remains fresh, perhaps because of the popularity of Mad Men in bringing 50's advertising culture back to prominence. In others, it hasn't aged well and is clearly a product of its time. If you can get back the casual sexism and references to tobacco's "cancer scare", however, it's still a great read.
I found it impossible to read this book without thinking of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, another exploration of how to affect people's behaviour "for their own good". It's hard to decide which is more insidious. While advertising has undoubtedly had long-term effects on our behaviour in the half-century since Packard wrote, it's also true that many of the techniques being espoused are now so obvious that they've ceased to be effective: I sometimes wonder whether advertising now almost has to be ironic just to get past people's media filters. As a thoughtful introduction from a time just starting to show the complexities of the modern world, though, this book is hard to beat.
I found it impossible to read this book without thinking of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, another exploration of how to affect people's behaviour "for their own good". It's hard to decide which is more insidious. While advertising has undoubtedly had long-term effects on our behaviour in the half-century since Packard wrote, it's also true that many of the techniques being espoused are now so obvious that they've ceased to be effective: I sometimes wonder whether advertising now almost has to be ironic just to get past people's media filters. As a thoughtful introduction from a time just starting to show the complexities of the modern world, though, this book is hard to beat.
January 8, 2019
A study from the 1950's on the intersection of psychology and merchandising and how it was affecting American culture and consumerism. It was one of four assigned books for us in my incoming college freshman class to read the summer before we started the fall semester in late August. Discussion classes were held during Freshman orientation.
January 4, 2013
Important and influential text about the methods used by advertisers on a largely unsuspecting public. Some say it's dated, now, but for me it still remains an essential text in how it presented its message in an important and accessible way.
March 30, 2016
Excellent
Relevant and timeless. A fascinating look from the past that explains the false pretense of motivation research. A great read.
Relevant and timeless. A fascinating look from the past that explains the false pretense of motivation research. A great read.
June 18, 2015
Have you ever wondered how marketing companies come up with their advertising campaigns? As consumers, we are a mess of contradictions; Motivational Research sorted us out years ago.
According to Wikipedia, Vance Packard "was born in Granville Summit, Pennsylvania, to Philip J. Packard and Mabel Case Packard. Between 1920-32 he attended local public schools in State College, Pennsylvania, where his father managed a dairy farm owned by the Pennsylvania State College (later Penn State University). In 1932 he entered Penn State, majoring in English. He graduated in 1936, and worked briefly for the local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times. He earned his master's degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1937. That year, he joined the Boston Daily Record as a staff reporter and a year later, he married Virginia Matthews.
"About 1940, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and in 1942, joined the staff of The American Magazine as a section editor, later becoming a staff writer. The American Magazine closed in July, 1956, and Packard moved over to Collier's where he worked as a writer. Collier's, too, closed by the end of 1956, allowing Packard to devote his full attention to writing books. In 1957, The Hidden Persuaders was published and received national attention. The book launched Packard's career as a social critic and full-time lecturer and book author. In 1961 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Penn State University."
In 1957, Packard published a book about M.R. (Motivational Research). He wrote it using anecdotal passages, and although not a scholarly presentation, it proved to be a very popular book: popular with everyone but the people behind the use of M.R. to sell us the 'package'.
In the mid-50's merchandisers began to get concerned that the buying public were feeling a bit jaded about their advertising slogans. In fact, the resistance was becoming so strong, that it soon became apparent that production would quickly outstrip sales, and that wasn't a good thing for a growing economy.
Packard's book concentrated on Ernest Dichter and his methods.
'Ernest Dichter (14 August 1907 – 21 November 1991) was an Austrian-American psychologist and marketing expert known as the "father of motivational research." Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Ideas he established were a significant influence on the practices of the advertising industry in the twentieth century. Dichter promised the "mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer". As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas. According to a New York Times article in 1998, he "was the first to coin the term focus group and to stress the importance of image and persuasion in advertising". In Vance Packard's book on Dichter and his practices, he recalls meeting Dichter in his castle and finding children watching televisions while resident psychologists, crouching behind special screens secretly filmed and studied their every action so that they could inform advertisers how to manipulate their unconscious minds. Dichter called such focus groups his "living laboratory". One such session led to the invention of the Barbie Doll: "What they wanted was someone sexy looking, someone that they wanted to grow up to be like," Dichter reported, "Long legs, big breasts, glamorous." To Packard, Dichter's gothic mansion was a sinister factory that manufactured and implanted self-destructive desires.' (Wikipedia)
Cigarette smoking was a case in point: it wasn't good for you, but you could be persuaded to keep it up, in spite of the health risks.
Dr. Dichter brooded a great deal over this old-fashioned Puritanism of the average America who “uses all types of soft drinks, cigarettes, liquor, and what not … yet at the same time seems to be consistently worried about what he is doing.” As a result of his brooding and probing Dr. Dichter arrived at this general conclusion: “Every time you sell a self-indulgent product . . . you have to assuage his guilt feelings . . . offer absolution.”
The smoking of cigarettes for many people had become deeply enmeshed in such guilt feelings. The feelings had been generated in part presumably because the smoking habit had been sternly repressed in their childhood, and partly from their very genuine suspicion that cigarettes were coffin nails. The cancer scare of the early fifties was just the final prod that sent sales skidding.
Some cigarette producers, including Philip Morris, tried to get the smoking public to use cigarette filters, but that proved a hard sell because President Roosevelt use to be photographed with one clinched between his teeth, and that turned people off.
The investigators found about a dozen reasons why many people continue to smoke despite their guilt feelings about the habit: they smoke to relieve tension, to express sociability, as a reward for effort, as an aid to poise, as an aid in anticipating stress, as proof of daring, as proof of conformity, because it is an accustomed ritual, and so on. They found that many people like to have a cigarette in their fingers when they enter a roomful of people as it makes them seem less nervous, more sophisticated.
Perhaps the major discovery of the investigators, however, is that Americans smoke to prove they are people of virile maturity. They see smoking as proving their vigor, potency. The report explains: “This is a psychological satisfaction sufficient to overcome health fears, to withstand moral censure, ridicule, or even the paradoxical weakness of ‘enslavement to habit.’”
A spectacular transvestism in the opposite direction was carried out in 1956 by Marlboro cigarettes, which used to be lipstick red and ivory tipped, designed primarily for women. Marlboro felt a little unhappy about its sexual designation because men smokers still outnumbered women two to one. When the cancer scare drove millions of men to show interest in filter tips, the Marlboro people decided to do a sexual flip-flop and go after the men, while holding onto as many women as they could. Their first move was to have Louis Cheskin, of the Color Research Institute, design a more masculine package. He did, in bold red and white. But that was only one of several significant changes. The Marlboro ads began featuring rugged, virile-looking men deep in work. To get the virile look desired the company used many non-professional models for the pictures (sailors, cowboys, and, reportedly, some men who worked at the company’s ad agency.) And the headlines of the ads began talking of Marlboro’s “man-sized flavor.”
The Marlboro Man was born.
It didn't take the M.R. people long to sort out what car buyers were doing with their purchases. (Remember, this was in the 50's when big cars were the main focus.)
People who want to seem conservative, to tell the world they are very serious and responsible, tend to buy Plymouth, Dodge, DeSoto, Packard, four-door sedans, dark colors, minimum accessories and gadgets.
People who want to seem sociable and up-to-date but in a middle-of-the-road sort of way tend to favor Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Chrysler, two-door coupés, light colors, moderate accessories and gadgets.
People who want to express showiness, to assert their individualism and modernity, tend to buy Ford, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Lincoln, hardtops, two tones, bright shades and hues, a range of extras, gadgets, fads.
People who need to express unusual status or individual needs favor Cadillac (ostentation, high status), Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Willys, convertibles (impulsiveness), very bright colors, red, yellow, white, latest gadgets and accessories.
Why do we buy some products and not others? It turns out that the reasons are usually hidden from our conscious minds. The Motivational Researchers sought to find out what they were.
In searching for extra psychological values that they could add to products to give them a more potent appeal, the depth merchandisers came upon many gratifying clues by studying our subconscious needs, yearnings, and cravings. Once the need was identified, and certified to be compelling, they began building the promise of its fulfillment into their sales presentations of such unlikely products as air conditioners, cake mixes, and motorboats. Here we will explore some of the more picturesque applications in merchandising eight of our hidden needs.
Selling emotional security
Selling reassurance of worth
Selling ego-gratification
Selling creative outlets
Selling love objects
Selling sense of power
Selling a sense of roots
Selling immortality
Packard gives great examples of each of this needs.
Sex: Well, you knew it had to be here, didn't you?
The potency of sex as a sales promoter was not, of course, an original discovery of the depth merchandisers. Sex images have long been cherished by ad men purely as eye stoppers. But with the depth approach, sex began taking on some interesting twists, ramifications, and subtleties. Penetration to deeper levels of consciousness was sought. Simple cheesecake and get-your-man themes of old, while used for routine selling, were regarded as limited-penetration weapons.
So sex-for-sex-sake proved to be only a lead-in to the differences in the way men and women shop.
On May 18, 1956, The New York Times printed a remarkable interview with a young man named Gerald Stahl, executive vice-president of the Package Designers Council. He stated: “Psychiatrists say that people have so much to choose from that they want help—they will like the package that hypnotizes them into picking it.” He urged food packers to put more hypnosis into their package designing, so that the housewife will stick out her hand for it rather than one of many rivals.
Mr. Stahl has found that it takes the average woman exactly twenty seconds to cover an aisle in a supermarket if she doesn’t tarry; so a good package design should hypnotize the woman like a flashlight waved in front of her eyes. Some colors such as red and yellow are helpful in creating hypnotic effects. Just putting the name and maker of the product on the box is old-fashioned and, he says, has absolutely no effect on the mid-century woman. She can’t read anything, really, until she has picked the box up in her hands. To get the woman to reach and get the package in her hands designers, he explained, are now using “symbols that have a dreamlike quality.” To cite examples of dreamlike quality, he mentioned the mouth-watering frosted cakes that decorate the packages of cake mixes, sizzling steaks, mushrooms frying in butter. The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat. Such illustrations make the woman’s imagination leap ahead to the end product. By 1956 package designers had even produced a box that, when the entranced shopper picked it up and began fingering it, would give a soft sales talk, or stress the brand name. The talk is on a strip that starts broadcasting when a shopper’s finger rubs it.
In the 1950's, people were aware of class differences, even though the American ethic said that they were of One Nation.
Warner laid down his concept of a layered America as a society of six classes. These classes, he felt, were distinct, and in each class you got a uniformity of behavior that was fairly predictable. He defined his social classes not only in terms of wealth and power but in terms of people’s consumption and sociability habits. This broader approach to differentiation has received support from other perceptive observers of American society. Russell Lynes, the Harper’s editor and writer, in his famous dissection of upper brows, lower brows, and middle brows, used the tossed salad as a more reliable indicator of a person’s status brow-wise than the size of his bank account. And David Riesman in his now classic The Lonely Crowd makes the point we are seeing the emergence of a new social system with criteria of status that were not considered in traditional systems of class structure.
Warner’s six classes shape up roughly as follows, in terms of typical constituents:
1.The upper upper—old-line aristocrats in a community.
2.The lower upper—the new rich.
3.The upper middle—professionals, executives, owners of some of the larger businesses in a community.
4.The lower middle—white-collar workers, tradesman, a few skilled workers.
5.The upper lower—mostly skilled and semiskilled.
6.The lower lower—laborers and unassimilated foreign groups.
Cars were not the only status symbols: houses, clothing, food, entertainment were also part of the mix. But how to sell you what you probably didn't know you wanted?
The depth probers studying the most effective ways to sell status symbols to American strivers concluded that most of us are vulnerable to one of three merchandising strategies.
One is to offer bigness. Millions of Americans were believed to equate, subconsciously, biggest with best, best at least at making a big impression. A kitchen-range maker found himself in trouble because he accepted as fact the explanation many people gave for preferring a large kitchen range rather than a smaller one of equal efficiency. The customers had explained, almost unanimously, that they had bought the bigger stove in order to have more work space. With this in mind the company put engineers to work, and they brought out a moderate-sized stove with all working elements engineered more compactly to permit an unusually large work space. The stove was a dud. Salesmen couldn’t move it off the floor. The firm called in a Connecticut market-research firm with staff psychologists who examined the problem and concluded: “People are willing to pay a great deal more for a little space they don’t really use because what they are interested in is not so much the space itself as the expensive appearance of a large range.”
A second way merchandisers found they could sell us their products as status symbols was through the price tag. By seemingly inverse logic, many discovered they could increase their sales by raising their price tag, in the topsy-turvy merchandising battle of the mid-fifties.
This battle for the Biggest Price Tag was waged with particular vehemence in the car field where, Tide magazine observed, “the almost insane drive by the consumer for a social prestige car has kept auto makers racing to produce the most luxurious vehicle.” As Ford Motor Company prepared to unveil its Continental with an up-to-$10,000 price tag insiders explained that the real goal was, for prestige purposes, to get a higher-priced car in the Ford line than General Motors had in the Cadillac. It would serve as a “rolling institution” and its prestige would rub off on the lowlier Ford makes. Tide summed this up by saying that “at $10,000 the Mark II Continental Is Ford’s Challenge to G.M’s Caddy, Top U.S. Prestige Car.” The problem was not to outsell the Caddy but to top it in elegant overtones. There were rumors that “applicants” for the car would have to submit applications and be screened for financial status and social standing. The Ford people never confirmed this, but they did suggest that the Lincoln dealers would be selective in determining who would get the car in each community and who wouldn’t. After the car went on sale reports from dealers stated that 90 percent of the people buying paid spot cash. (Cadillac responded to the challenge in 1957 by bringing out a $12,500 car.)
The third strategy that merchandisers found was effective in selling products as status symbols was to persuade personages of indisputably high status to invite the rest of us to join them in enjoying the product. The testimonial can be a mighty effective selling device, Printer’s Ink pointed out, cynics to the contrary. This is particularly true where the celebrity has some plausible ground for being interested in the product. Testimonials by celebrities were not a new discovery, but in the early fifties they were placed on a systematic basis. The man who did it was Jules Alberti, a dapper man who set up Endorsements, Inc., after World War II on a $500 investment. At first the ad agencies shunned the idea of being so forthright about procuring testimonials, but soon the logic of the service he was offering proved overwhelming, and by 1956 he was grossing nearly a million dollars a year and four hundred ad agencies had used his good offices in lining up endorsements, all of which, he insists, are true. In 1956 he said that testimonials should be written either by the celebrity himself or have the help of a top-flight copy writer who really believes what he is saying. Mr. Alberti complained that too few ad men really believed what they wrote any more and asked how men who let cynicism and disbelief creep into their thinking could produce really persuasive and believable copy. Professor Smith mentioned that many people nowadays express skepticism about testimonials but added that although people consciously deny being impressed by testimonials there is a strong suspicion that unconsciously they are impressed with them.
"What's in your wallet?"
So what's wrong with a simple cup of tea? Too weak for real men? The M.R. people have a solution for that, too.
In his explorations Dr. Dichter concluded that there was still another handicap that should be faced. That was an awkward fact of history—the Boston Tea Party. He purported to find, in tracking down tea’s difficulties, that Americans had been subconsciously resistant to tea ever since that night nearly two centuries ago when colonial patriots in a burst of exuberance tossed a cargo of British tea into the Boston harbor. The continued, admiring gloating over this act of rebellion in American schoolrooms, he concluded, has over the centuries imbued young Americans with an anti-tea attitude. Dr. Dichter advised tea people that a part of their corrective campaign ought to start right in American classrooms and with the writers of American histories. Americans should be taught, he said, that the Boston Tea Party was not a protest against tea but rather a dramatic expression of the importance of tea in the life of Americans in revolutionary times. At first thought this thesis may sound preposterously farfetched. A study of colonial life in pre-Revolutionary days does reveal, however, that American consuming habits were closely tied to tea and that many women in particular felt they couldn’t live without it.
The problem of straightening Americans out on the real meaning of the Boston Tea Party was admittedly a long-term project, but there were some things tea merchants could do right away, Dr. Dichter felt, to get out of their downward spiral. He urged the Tea Council to put some muscle in the tea mage, make it more of a virile brew and get it out of the current image as a gentle medicinal sauce for ladies and sissies to sip. The insipid colors in ads were soon replaced by brilliant masculine reds, and the old promise of being a pickup for tired nerves was replaced, in the words of writer in The Reporter magazine, by “sounds like a police sergeant clearing his throat—‘Make it heft, hot and hearty . . . Take tea and see.’ . . . Consumers were led to feel that tea-drinking is no more unmanly than felling an oak or killing a moose.” Heft, obviously hot men were shown drinking iced tea right out of a pitcher.
If you wish to know first hand what these practitioners of the Hidden Persuasion are up to, I can heartily suggest that you get a copy of this book and read it for yourself.
According to Wikipedia, Vance Packard "was born in Granville Summit, Pennsylvania, to Philip J. Packard and Mabel Case Packard. Between 1920-32 he attended local public schools in State College, Pennsylvania, where his father managed a dairy farm owned by the Pennsylvania State College (later Penn State University). In 1932 he entered Penn State, majoring in English. He graduated in 1936, and worked briefly for the local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times. He earned his master's degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1937. That year, he joined the Boston Daily Record as a staff reporter and a year later, he married Virginia Matthews.
"About 1940, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and in 1942, joined the staff of The American Magazine as a section editor, later becoming a staff writer. The American Magazine closed in July, 1956, and Packard moved over to Collier's where he worked as a writer. Collier's, too, closed by the end of 1956, allowing Packard to devote his full attention to writing books. In 1957, The Hidden Persuaders was published and received national attention. The book launched Packard's career as a social critic and full-time lecturer and book author. In 1961 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Penn State University."
In 1957, Packard published a book about M.R. (Motivational Research). He wrote it using anecdotal passages, and although not a scholarly presentation, it proved to be a very popular book: popular with everyone but the people behind the use of M.R. to sell us the 'package'.
In the mid-50's merchandisers began to get concerned that the buying public were feeling a bit jaded about their advertising slogans. In fact, the resistance was becoming so strong, that it soon became apparent that production would quickly outstrip sales, and that wasn't a good thing for a growing economy.
Packard's book concentrated on Ernest Dichter and his methods.
'Ernest Dichter (14 August 1907 – 21 November 1991) was an Austrian-American psychologist and marketing expert known as the "father of motivational research." Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Ideas he established were a significant influence on the practices of the advertising industry in the twentieth century. Dichter promised the "mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer". As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas. According to a New York Times article in 1998, he "was the first to coin the term focus group and to stress the importance of image and persuasion in advertising". In Vance Packard's book on Dichter and his practices, he recalls meeting Dichter in his castle and finding children watching televisions while resident psychologists, crouching behind special screens secretly filmed and studied their every action so that they could inform advertisers how to manipulate their unconscious minds. Dichter called such focus groups his "living laboratory". One such session led to the invention of the Barbie Doll: "What they wanted was someone sexy looking, someone that they wanted to grow up to be like," Dichter reported, "Long legs, big breasts, glamorous." To Packard, Dichter's gothic mansion was a sinister factory that manufactured and implanted self-destructive desires.' (Wikipedia)
Cigarette smoking was a case in point: it wasn't good for you, but you could be persuaded to keep it up, in spite of the health risks.
Dr. Dichter brooded a great deal over this old-fashioned Puritanism of the average America who “uses all types of soft drinks, cigarettes, liquor, and what not … yet at the same time seems to be consistently worried about what he is doing.” As a result of his brooding and probing Dr. Dichter arrived at this general conclusion: “Every time you sell a self-indulgent product . . . you have to assuage his guilt feelings . . . offer absolution.”
The smoking of cigarettes for many people had become deeply enmeshed in such guilt feelings. The feelings had been generated in part presumably because the smoking habit had been sternly repressed in their childhood, and partly from their very genuine suspicion that cigarettes were coffin nails. The cancer scare of the early fifties was just the final prod that sent sales skidding.
Some cigarette producers, including Philip Morris, tried to get the smoking public to use cigarette filters, but that proved a hard sell because President Roosevelt use to be photographed with one clinched between his teeth, and that turned people off.
The investigators found about a dozen reasons why many people continue to smoke despite their guilt feelings about the habit: they smoke to relieve tension, to express sociability, as a reward for effort, as an aid to poise, as an aid in anticipating stress, as proof of daring, as proof of conformity, because it is an accustomed ritual, and so on. They found that many people like to have a cigarette in their fingers when they enter a roomful of people as it makes them seem less nervous, more sophisticated.
Perhaps the major discovery of the investigators, however, is that Americans smoke to prove they are people of virile maturity. They see smoking as proving their vigor, potency. The report explains: “This is a psychological satisfaction sufficient to overcome health fears, to withstand moral censure, ridicule, or even the paradoxical weakness of ‘enslavement to habit.’”
A spectacular transvestism in the opposite direction was carried out in 1956 by Marlboro cigarettes, which used to be lipstick red and ivory tipped, designed primarily for women. Marlboro felt a little unhappy about its sexual designation because men smokers still outnumbered women two to one. When the cancer scare drove millions of men to show interest in filter tips, the Marlboro people decided to do a sexual flip-flop and go after the men, while holding onto as many women as they could. Their first move was to have Louis Cheskin, of the Color Research Institute, design a more masculine package. He did, in bold red and white. But that was only one of several significant changes. The Marlboro ads began featuring rugged, virile-looking men deep in work. To get the virile look desired the company used many non-professional models for the pictures (sailors, cowboys, and, reportedly, some men who worked at the company’s ad agency.) And the headlines of the ads began talking of Marlboro’s “man-sized flavor.”
The Marlboro Man was born.
It didn't take the M.R. people long to sort out what car buyers were doing with their purchases. (Remember, this was in the 50's when big cars were the main focus.)
People who want to seem conservative, to tell the world they are very serious and responsible, tend to buy Plymouth, Dodge, DeSoto, Packard, four-door sedans, dark colors, minimum accessories and gadgets.
People who want to seem sociable and up-to-date but in a middle-of-the-road sort of way tend to favor Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Chrysler, two-door coupés, light colors, moderate accessories and gadgets.
People who want to express showiness, to assert their individualism and modernity, tend to buy Ford, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Lincoln, hardtops, two tones, bright shades and hues, a range of extras, gadgets, fads.
People who need to express unusual status or individual needs favor Cadillac (ostentation, high status), Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Willys, convertibles (impulsiveness), very bright colors, red, yellow, white, latest gadgets and accessories.
Why do we buy some products and not others? It turns out that the reasons are usually hidden from our conscious minds. The Motivational Researchers sought to find out what they were.
In searching for extra psychological values that they could add to products to give them a more potent appeal, the depth merchandisers came upon many gratifying clues by studying our subconscious needs, yearnings, and cravings. Once the need was identified, and certified to be compelling, they began building the promise of its fulfillment into their sales presentations of such unlikely products as air conditioners, cake mixes, and motorboats. Here we will explore some of the more picturesque applications in merchandising eight of our hidden needs.
Selling emotional security
Selling reassurance of worth
Selling ego-gratification
Selling creative outlets
Selling love objects
Selling sense of power
Selling a sense of roots
Selling immortality
Packard gives great examples of each of this needs.
Sex: Well, you knew it had to be here, didn't you?
The potency of sex as a sales promoter was not, of course, an original discovery of the depth merchandisers. Sex images have long been cherished by ad men purely as eye stoppers. But with the depth approach, sex began taking on some interesting twists, ramifications, and subtleties. Penetration to deeper levels of consciousness was sought. Simple cheesecake and get-your-man themes of old, while used for routine selling, were regarded as limited-penetration weapons.
So sex-for-sex-sake proved to be only a lead-in to the differences in the way men and women shop.
On May 18, 1956, The New York Times printed a remarkable interview with a young man named Gerald Stahl, executive vice-president of the Package Designers Council. He stated: “Psychiatrists say that people have so much to choose from that they want help—they will like the package that hypnotizes them into picking it.” He urged food packers to put more hypnosis into their package designing, so that the housewife will stick out her hand for it rather than one of many rivals.
Mr. Stahl has found that it takes the average woman exactly twenty seconds to cover an aisle in a supermarket if she doesn’t tarry; so a good package design should hypnotize the woman like a flashlight waved in front of her eyes. Some colors such as red and yellow are helpful in creating hypnotic effects. Just putting the name and maker of the product on the box is old-fashioned and, he says, has absolutely no effect on the mid-century woman. She can’t read anything, really, until she has picked the box up in her hands. To get the woman to reach and get the package in her hands designers, he explained, are now using “symbols that have a dreamlike quality.” To cite examples of dreamlike quality, he mentioned the mouth-watering frosted cakes that decorate the packages of cake mixes, sizzling steaks, mushrooms frying in butter. The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat. Such illustrations make the woman’s imagination leap ahead to the end product. By 1956 package designers had even produced a box that, when the entranced shopper picked it up and began fingering it, would give a soft sales talk, or stress the brand name. The talk is on a strip that starts broadcasting when a shopper’s finger rubs it.
In the 1950's, people were aware of class differences, even though the American ethic said that they were of One Nation.
Warner laid down his concept of a layered America as a society of six classes. These classes, he felt, were distinct, and in each class you got a uniformity of behavior that was fairly predictable. He defined his social classes not only in terms of wealth and power but in terms of people’s consumption and sociability habits. This broader approach to differentiation has received support from other perceptive observers of American society. Russell Lynes, the Harper’s editor and writer, in his famous dissection of upper brows, lower brows, and middle brows, used the tossed salad as a more reliable indicator of a person’s status brow-wise than the size of his bank account. And David Riesman in his now classic The Lonely Crowd makes the point we are seeing the emergence of a new social system with criteria of status that were not considered in traditional systems of class structure.
Warner’s six classes shape up roughly as follows, in terms of typical constituents:
1.The upper upper—old-line aristocrats in a community.
2.The lower upper—the new rich.
3.The upper middle—professionals, executives, owners of some of the larger businesses in a community.
4.The lower middle—white-collar workers, tradesman, a few skilled workers.
5.The upper lower—mostly skilled and semiskilled.
6.The lower lower—laborers and unassimilated foreign groups.
Cars were not the only status symbols: houses, clothing, food, entertainment were also part of the mix. But how to sell you what you probably didn't know you wanted?
The depth probers studying the most effective ways to sell status symbols to American strivers concluded that most of us are vulnerable to one of three merchandising strategies.
One is to offer bigness. Millions of Americans were believed to equate, subconsciously, biggest with best, best at least at making a big impression. A kitchen-range maker found himself in trouble because he accepted as fact the explanation many people gave for preferring a large kitchen range rather than a smaller one of equal efficiency. The customers had explained, almost unanimously, that they had bought the bigger stove in order to have more work space. With this in mind the company put engineers to work, and they brought out a moderate-sized stove with all working elements engineered more compactly to permit an unusually large work space. The stove was a dud. Salesmen couldn’t move it off the floor. The firm called in a Connecticut market-research firm with staff psychologists who examined the problem and concluded: “People are willing to pay a great deal more for a little space they don’t really use because what they are interested in is not so much the space itself as the expensive appearance of a large range.”
A second way merchandisers found they could sell us their products as status symbols was through the price tag. By seemingly inverse logic, many discovered they could increase their sales by raising their price tag, in the topsy-turvy merchandising battle of the mid-fifties.
This battle for the Biggest Price Tag was waged with particular vehemence in the car field where, Tide magazine observed, “the almost insane drive by the consumer for a social prestige car has kept auto makers racing to produce the most luxurious vehicle.” As Ford Motor Company prepared to unveil its Continental with an up-to-$10,000 price tag insiders explained that the real goal was, for prestige purposes, to get a higher-priced car in the Ford line than General Motors had in the Cadillac. It would serve as a “rolling institution” and its prestige would rub off on the lowlier Ford makes. Tide summed this up by saying that “at $10,000 the Mark II Continental Is Ford’s Challenge to G.M’s Caddy, Top U.S. Prestige Car.” The problem was not to outsell the Caddy but to top it in elegant overtones. There were rumors that “applicants” for the car would have to submit applications and be screened for financial status and social standing. The Ford people never confirmed this, but they did suggest that the Lincoln dealers would be selective in determining who would get the car in each community and who wouldn’t. After the car went on sale reports from dealers stated that 90 percent of the people buying paid spot cash. (Cadillac responded to the challenge in 1957 by bringing out a $12,500 car.)
The third strategy that merchandisers found was effective in selling products as status symbols was to persuade personages of indisputably high status to invite the rest of us to join them in enjoying the product. The testimonial can be a mighty effective selling device, Printer’s Ink pointed out, cynics to the contrary. This is particularly true where the celebrity has some plausible ground for being interested in the product. Testimonials by celebrities were not a new discovery, but in the early fifties they were placed on a systematic basis. The man who did it was Jules Alberti, a dapper man who set up Endorsements, Inc., after World War II on a $500 investment. At first the ad agencies shunned the idea of being so forthright about procuring testimonials, but soon the logic of the service he was offering proved overwhelming, and by 1956 he was grossing nearly a million dollars a year and four hundred ad agencies had used his good offices in lining up endorsements, all of which, he insists, are true. In 1956 he said that testimonials should be written either by the celebrity himself or have the help of a top-flight copy writer who really believes what he is saying. Mr. Alberti complained that too few ad men really believed what they wrote any more and asked how men who let cynicism and disbelief creep into their thinking could produce really persuasive and believable copy. Professor Smith mentioned that many people nowadays express skepticism about testimonials but added that although people consciously deny being impressed by testimonials there is a strong suspicion that unconsciously they are impressed with them.
"What's in your wallet?"
So what's wrong with a simple cup of tea? Too weak for real men? The M.R. people have a solution for that, too.
In his explorations Dr. Dichter concluded that there was still another handicap that should be faced. That was an awkward fact of history—the Boston Tea Party. He purported to find, in tracking down tea’s difficulties, that Americans had been subconsciously resistant to tea ever since that night nearly two centuries ago when colonial patriots in a burst of exuberance tossed a cargo of British tea into the Boston harbor. The continued, admiring gloating over this act of rebellion in American schoolrooms, he concluded, has over the centuries imbued young Americans with an anti-tea attitude. Dr. Dichter advised tea people that a part of their corrective campaign ought to start right in American classrooms and with the writers of American histories. Americans should be taught, he said, that the Boston Tea Party was not a protest against tea but rather a dramatic expression of the importance of tea in the life of Americans in revolutionary times. At first thought this thesis may sound preposterously farfetched. A study of colonial life in pre-Revolutionary days does reveal, however, that American consuming habits were closely tied to tea and that many women in particular felt they couldn’t live without it.
The problem of straightening Americans out on the real meaning of the Boston Tea Party was admittedly a long-term project, but there were some things tea merchants could do right away, Dr. Dichter felt, to get out of their downward spiral. He urged the Tea Council to put some muscle in the tea mage, make it more of a virile brew and get it out of the current image as a gentle medicinal sauce for ladies and sissies to sip. The insipid colors in ads were soon replaced by brilliant masculine reds, and the old promise of being a pickup for tired nerves was replaced, in the words of writer in The Reporter magazine, by “sounds like a police sergeant clearing his throat—‘Make it heft, hot and hearty . . . Take tea and see.’ . . . Consumers were led to feel that tea-drinking is no more unmanly than felling an oak or killing a moose.” Heft, obviously hot men were shown drinking iced tea right out of a pitcher.
If you wish to know first hand what these practitioners of the Hidden Persuasion are up to, I can heartily suggest that you get a copy of this book and read it for yourself.
November 25, 2023
Reading this book in 2023 --- almost 70 years after its first publication --- is such a wild read. Where do I even start.
The Hidden Persuaders describes the very beginnings of western consumption-driven economies and societies: more, bigger, better. Never happy, always consuming. The machine must keep running.
From products we use to products we use-up; planned obsolescence; ads addressing our insecurities and fears. It's all there in this book documenting it's very beginnings.
By now in 2023 we have perfected this consumption machine and it's running at an unimaginable speed and impact on our lives.
It's no longer paper ads and pickles in a jar for sure: It's the internet running on ads, big tech like Facebook and Google running on ads. We have influencers, and the emergent LLMs who --- no surprise --- are getting used to make us consume consume consume.
The last 50 years have seen the ideas and thoughts outlined in this book taken to the extreme.
Reading this book in the context of its publication date (the 1950s), with morbid curiosity I can't wait to see what the next 30 years will have in store for us.
The Hidden Persuaders describes the very beginnings of western consumption-driven economies and societies: more, bigger, better. Never happy, always consuming. The machine must keep running.
From products we use to products we use-up; planned obsolescence; ads addressing our insecurities and fears. It's all there in this book documenting it's very beginnings.
By now in 2023 we have perfected this consumption machine and it's running at an unimaginable speed and impact on our lives.
It's no longer paper ads and pickles in a jar for sure: It's the internet running on ads, big tech like Facebook and Google running on ads. We have influencers, and the emergent LLMs who --- no surprise --- are getting used to make us consume consume consume.
The last 50 years have seen the ideas and thoughts outlined in this book taken to the extreme.
Reading this book in the context of its publication date (the 1950s), with morbid curiosity I can't wait to see what the next 30 years will have in store for us.
Want to read
September 13, 2024“It seems that TV companies simply cannot get staff nowadays. Us lazy, work-shy British steadfastly refuse to do unattractive, low-paid menial jobs like TV-presenting and newsreading. Then, practically every couple in the adverts consisted of a White female and coloured male, this often in the almost subliminal form forewarned by Vance Packard in his famous books The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The People-Shapers (1977). Many of these deeply offensive images would appear only fleetingly in the background. There was virtually no respite from it – it was unrelenting. This constant promotion of miscegenation is too consistent to be anything but deliberate, genocidal propaganda.”
-Simon Sheppard, “From Blonking to Beatification”
-Simon Sheppard, “From Blonking to Beatification”
April 5, 2013
Gloriously outdated yet poignantly prescient and relevant. A wonderful insight into the inner workings of the mind and how far marketers will go to influence decisions.
This was the book that tutors told me was vital during my media degree and no doubt fifteen years later it is still regarded as high on the list of 'must reads'.
The epilogue, written in the eighties is possibly more outdated than the rest of the book. A great shame that Packard died in the early nineties and wasn't around to witness the rise of the internet, big data and the greatest loss of personal privacy to the 'hidden persuaders' ever seen. Or indeed, not seen.
This was the book that tutors told me was vital during my media degree and no doubt fifteen years later it is still regarded as high on the list of 'must reads'.
The epilogue, written in the eighties is possibly more outdated than the rest of the book. A great shame that Packard died in the early nineties and wasn't around to witness the rise of the internet, big data and the greatest loss of personal privacy to the 'hidden persuaders' ever seen. Or indeed, not seen.
September 10, 2017
Superbly written and a warning to the future, which we are now living in.
March 6, 2020
this also took me a year to read, but mostly bc it was never a priority. I came across this because it's cited in "Mad Men" in an episode. This was one of the earliest books detailing how advertising works behind the scenes (in the 60s), and recounts how psychologists in the Mad Men era made fortunes running market research studies for ad firms. Funny enough, most of the research institutes doing this kind of research were Freudian research centers. It was really interesting to see this investigative piece go in depth into the phenomenons of the human mind almost half a century prior to modern cognitive science and behavioral psychology.
Read
April 12, 2020Küçücük bir güven pırıltısının yeryüzünden kaybolduğu an, hoşa gitmeyecek her şey meydana gelebilir!
July 10, 2023
ahead of its time in some areas, extremely dated in others
April 13, 2020
Shhhhh.. It's a secret.
November 17, 2021
I read this waaaaay back when. Things have only gotten more so since then. Even though I think the parts about subliminal things (sexy images in ice cubes, super-fast images of popcorn on movie screens) turned out to be not so true. But advertising is both blatant and insidious, and this book was the first best seller than exposed how it works.
November 13, 2012
The Hidden Persuaders (1957) by Vance Packard is a fascinating book for a number of reasons. It can be handily read using a voice like an old documentary as a way to get in the mood for Mad Men. Packard is also interesting to read because he is a Malcolm Gladwell of his time; a journalist who wrote up advertising and psychology in a compelling way. The book is also interesting to read because it shows how in some ways things have changed enormously, for instance in the brands of cars people buy, while in other ways things have hardly changed such as by the way of looking at how people present themselves in the things they buy and how that can be manipulated.
The book looks at the ‘science’ of motivational research (MR) that was becoming fashionable in the 1950s. Advertising firms were consulting psychologists about how they could manipulate people into buying various brands. Market Research in general is certainly a field of study today, but how much people can be manipulated is still in question. The science that underlies the field seems to have shifted substantially. No longer, as stated in The Hidden Persuaders, is homosexuality thought to be a mental illness. Freud is regarded as dubious scientist at best today.
The question with much of the book, and much of psychology, is how much can be generalised from particular situations. Certainly we are all manipulated to a degree but some long running campaigns, such as getting men to buy a more similar amount of clothing as women, seem to be a perpetual campaign.
The book also questions as to how much we should allow ourselves, or encourage, our own manipulation and possible Orwellian futures are pondered including direct manipulation of people’s brains electrically which Packard puts forward as being quite possibly a reality in the year 2000.
The section on political advertising, with the emphasis on creating an attitude toward a candidate rather than carefully pondering their policies is as relevant today as it was in 1957. The discussion of advertising to children is also remarkably up to date.
From the perspective of 50 years later the book is very much worth reading but the efforts of advertising over the past half-century show that you can shift people’s attitudes but that they also reflect the times and that despite all that advertising people still exhibit a remarkable degree of independent thought that resists advertising.
The book looks at the ‘science’ of motivational research (MR) that was becoming fashionable in the 1950s. Advertising firms were consulting psychologists about how they could manipulate people into buying various brands. Market Research in general is certainly a field of study today, but how much people can be manipulated is still in question. The science that underlies the field seems to have shifted substantially. No longer, as stated in The Hidden Persuaders, is homosexuality thought to be a mental illness. Freud is regarded as dubious scientist at best today.
The question with much of the book, and much of psychology, is how much can be generalised from particular situations. Certainly we are all manipulated to a degree but some long running campaigns, such as getting men to buy a more similar amount of clothing as women, seem to be a perpetual campaign.
The book also questions as to how much we should allow ourselves, or encourage, our own manipulation and possible Orwellian futures are pondered including direct manipulation of people’s brains electrically which Packard puts forward as being quite possibly a reality in the year 2000.
The section on political advertising, with the emphasis on creating an attitude toward a candidate rather than carefully pondering their policies is as relevant today as it was in 1957. The discussion of advertising to children is also remarkably up to date.
From the perspective of 50 years later the book is very much worth reading but the efforts of advertising over the past half-century show that you can shift people’s attitudes but that they also reflect the times and that despite all that advertising people still exhibit a remarkable degree of independent thought that resists advertising.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 26, 2023
This book is going to become one of my staff picks. I heard about it from a retired psychologist.
Despite graduating with a degree in marketing, even I learned stuff as I read this book! The book has a great introduction by Mark Crispin Miller. The main drawback to me is the typos in this new edition.
Still, the information is as valid today as when Packard wrote it in the 1950s. I highly recommend it. I feel as if I could read it multiple times and glean new insights every time.
I took notes as I read of things I wanted to remember.
Motivation research is not an anomalous or even a recent trend. It is something that has been going on for decades. My jaw dropped when I read that planned obsolescence (not called this but in essence what it is) had been discussed by marketers even back to the 1930s. However, it gained additional traction in the 40s and 50s.
Packard's premise is that we are routinely and successfully manipulated by manufacturers, fundraisers, and politicians (p. 17). This book was published in 1957 and it's only gotten worse since he wrote it. Packard frequently uses the term merchandizers; which I will refer to as marketers in my notes.
The intent of Motivation researchers is not to "persuade", free us, or make us happy; rather their intent is to replace it with their own imperatives.
In the post-World War II world growing output means growing our Gross National Product (GNP) (p. 42). There is constant pressure to consume in order to grow our GNP. "An ever-expanding system requires that we be persuaded to consume to meet the demands of the needs of the production process." Packard even quotes one marketer as saying "Capitalism is dead. Consumerism is king!" (p. 43).
Chapter 3 discusses the early years of motivation research, which seeks to understand unconscious and subconscious factors that motivate people. This process seeks not just insights, but "triggers of action". Both word and picture triggers can be used to evoke desired responses.
Professor Clyde Miller who wrote the book "The Process of Persuasion", finds that people are "creatures of conditioned reflex." .... Whether selling soft drinks or political theory, the goal is to develop these conditioned reflexes by flashing on trigger words, symbols or acts.
To expand markets, marketers worked to build new frontiers with new and future consumers. They worked to create new, broader and more insatiable demand for products. One example from the book is the men's clothing industry (shoes & suits). Prior to the 1950s, men did not replace their suits or shoes frequently. They had 1 or 2 suits that they wore regularly. So advertising and marketing worked to make men more style-conscious. These efforts were successful. {As I read this, I wondered, has marketing made our entire culture more narcissistic?}
Packard spends good portions of the book discussing the basic change in the American character (individual, independent, and self-reliant) in the 20th century from inner-directed to other-directed, which was caused by or reflected by our preoccupation with consuming (p. 153). Other-directed people are largely guided by the expectancy of the crowd/peers/associates (p. 162) or a group identity by belonging to various groups and playing on teams ( p. 188). By the mid-50s many Americans viewed self as meaningless except as a member of a group.
Marketers in the 1950s started moving into the political and workforce realm too. They weren't just building future consumers - children. They were also molding voters and employees. Persuaders' aim was not just to get us to buy things ... "the aim is now nothing less than to influence the state of our mind and to channel our behavior as citizens (p. 170) and as consumers of politics.
An study by the Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology experimented with people know to be pro- or anti-Democratic (p. 174). People listen to a 10-minute speech on national affairs, which was slanted to be 1/2 pro and 1/2 anti. Three weeks later, these people were tested on their recall of the material. The study found that people remembered information that harmonized with their political viewpoint or frame of reference; they did not remember anything that did not harmonize with their own preconceived notions.
Political marketer Murray Chotiner used the following techniques to sell a political candidate (p. 179). 1) Present them with the "Good Guy" and "the Bad Guy" 2) The use of, or defense against, the "Smear". 3) Generating the appearance of public demand. 4) Winning people's hearts with carefully stimulated candor. Do these seem familiar? I bet we can all think of examples of each in politics today.
Chapter 19 is titled "The Engineered Yes".
"To PR [public relations] men must go the most important social engineering role of them all - the gradual reorganization of human society, piece by piece, and structure by structure." --Public relations counselor G. Edward Pendray (p. 201).
Another famous propaganda man (the father of public relations), Edward L. Bernays, who wrote a book entitled "The Engineering of Consent", said: "It would be ideal if all of us could make up our minds independently by evaluation of all pertinent facts objectively. That, however, is not possible." He expounded upon this further in "The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, writing "Newsworthy events usually do not happen by accident. They are planned to deliberately accomplish a purpose, to influence ideas and actions."
Sidenote: I've studied Bernays. He was an expert in newsworthy events. He wrote several books on PR. In World War I he worked at the precursor to the CIA, the Committee on Public Information (the CPI), that marketed the war to Americans and America to the world. One of the many newsworthy events planned by Bernay was the "Torches of Freedom" parade with smoking women in the 1920s. He is also the reason we eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Also interestingly, Bernays is related to Sigmund Freud.
The final chapter of this book is "The question of morality" (p. 231). There are benefits to exploration of human behavior. But there are also many deep, moral questions to think about. These are just a few examples of the questions Packard asks:
Should we all be "given" whatever our ids "want"?
What kind of society are these persuaders seeking to build for us?
Where is our economy taking us under the pressures of consumerism?
Is it right to manipulate human personality?
When do manipulative attempts become socially undesirable?
How do we know what (or who) to believe?
My own question as I read this. Are we really well-informed when we watch the news and listen to political speeches, or are we being manipulated?
This book can help us build up what Clyde Miller (in his book "The Process of Persuasion") called a "recognition reflex", which protect us against the petty trickery and false persuasion of persuaders and powerful leaders.
This book would pair well with "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler and "The Smear" by Sharyl Attkisson.
Despite graduating with a degree in marketing, even I learned stuff as I read this book! The book has a great introduction by Mark Crispin Miller. The main drawback to me is the typos in this new edition.
Still, the information is as valid today as when Packard wrote it in the 1950s. I highly recommend it. I feel as if I could read it multiple times and glean new insights every time.
I took notes as I read of things I wanted to remember.
Motivation research is not an anomalous or even a recent trend. It is something that has been going on for decades. My jaw dropped when I read that planned obsolescence (not called this but in essence what it is) had been discussed by marketers even back to the 1930s. However, it gained additional traction in the 40s and 50s.
Packard's premise is that we are routinely and successfully manipulated by manufacturers, fundraisers, and politicians (p. 17). This book was published in 1957 and it's only gotten worse since he wrote it. Packard frequently uses the term merchandizers; which I will refer to as marketers in my notes.
The intent of Motivation researchers is not to "persuade", free us, or make us happy; rather their intent is to replace it with their own imperatives.
In the post-World War II world growing output means growing our Gross National Product (GNP) (p. 42). There is constant pressure to consume in order to grow our GNP. "An ever-expanding system requires that we be persuaded to consume to meet the demands of the needs of the production process." Packard even quotes one marketer as saying "Capitalism is dead. Consumerism is king!" (p. 43).
Chapter 3 discusses the early years of motivation research, which seeks to understand unconscious and subconscious factors that motivate people. This process seeks not just insights, but "triggers of action". Both word and picture triggers can be used to evoke desired responses.
Professor Clyde Miller who wrote the book "The Process of Persuasion", finds that people are "creatures of conditioned reflex." .... Whether selling soft drinks or political theory, the goal is to develop these conditioned reflexes by flashing on trigger words, symbols or acts.
To expand markets, marketers worked to build new frontiers with new and future consumers. They worked to create new, broader and more insatiable demand for products. One example from the book is the men's clothing industry (shoes & suits). Prior to the 1950s, men did not replace their suits or shoes frequently. They had 1 or 2 suits that they wore regularly. So advertising and marketing worked to make men more style-conscious. These efforts were successful. {As I read this, I wondered, has marketing made our entire culture more narcissistic?}
Packard spends good portions of the book discussing the basic change in the American character (individual, independent, and self-reliant) in the 20th century from inner-directed to other-directed, which was caused by or reflected by our preoccupation with consuming (p. 153). Other-directed people are largely guided by the expectancy of the crowd/peers/associates (p. 162) or a group identity by belonging to various groups and playing on teams ( p. 188). By the mid-50s many Americans viewed self as meaningless except as a member of a group.
Marketers in the 1950s started moving into the political and workforce realm too. They weren't just building future consumers - children. They were also molding voters and employees. Persuaders' aim was not just to get us to buy things ... "the aim is now nothing less than to influence the state of our mind and to channel our behavior as citizens (p. 170) and as consumers of politics.
An study by the Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology experimented with people know to be pro- or anti-Democratic (p. 174). People listen to a 10-minute speech on national affairs, which was slanted to be 1/2 pro and 1/2 anti. Three weeks later, these people were tested on their recall of the material. The study found that people remembered information that harmonized with their political viewpoint or frame of reference; they did not remember anything that did not harmonize with their own preconceived notions.
Political marketer Murray Chotiner used the following techniques to sell a political candidate (p. 179). 1) Present them with the "Good Guy" and "the Bad Guy" 2) The use of, or defense against, the "Smear". 3) Generating the appearance of public demand. 4) Winning people's hearts with carefully stimulated candor. Do these seem familiar? I bet we can all think of examples of each in politics today.
Chapter 19 is titled "The Engineered Yes".
"To PR [public relations] men must go the most important social engineering role of them all - the gradual reorganization of human society, piece by piece, and structure by structure." --Public relations counselor G. Edward Pendray (p. 201).
Another famous propaganda man (the father of public relations), Edward L. Bernays, who wrote a book entitled "The Engineering of Consent", said: "It would be ideal if all of us could make up our minds independently by evaluation of all pertinent facts objectively. That, however, is not possible." He expounded upon this further in "The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, writing "Newsworthy events usually do not happen by accident. They are planned to deliberately accomplish a purpose, to influence ideas and actions."
Sidenote: I've studied Bernays. He was an expert in newsworthy events. He wrote several books on PR. In World War I he worked at the precursor to the CIA, the Committee on Public Information (the CPI), that marketed the war to Americans and America to the world. One of the many newsworthy events planned by Bernay was the "Torches of Freedom" parade with smoking women in the 1920s. He is also the reason we eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Also interestingly, Bernays is related to Sigmund Freud.
The final chapter of this book is "The question of morality" (p. 231). There are benefits to exploration of human behavior. But there are also many deep, moral questions to think about. These are just a few examples of the questions Packard asks:
Should we all be "given" whatever our ids "want"?
What kind of society are these persuaders seeking to build for us?
Where is our economy taking us under the pressures of consumerism?
Is it right to manipulate human personality?
When do manipulative attempts become socially undesirable?
How do we know what (or who) to believe?
My own question as I read this. Are we really well-informed when we watch the news and listen to political speeches, or are we being manipulated?
This book can help us build up what Clyde Miller (in his book "The Process of Persuasion") called a "recognition reflex", which protect us against the petty trickery and false persuasion of persuaders and powerful leaders.
This book would pair well with "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler and "The Smear" by Sharyl Attkisson.
February 15, 2017
Fascinating book about the nascent Mad Men era, when advertisers and marketers teamed with social scientists to tap into the consumer psyche. Packard gives lots of anecdotes but doesn't really give away his own thoughts about the morality of the persuasive tactics and maneuvers on which he reports until late in the book, when he asks, "But when you are manipulating, where do you stop? Who is to fix the point at which manipulative attempts become socially undesirable?"
Of course a lot has changed in sixty years. For one thing, we're not quite as naive about advertisers. We may not always know how they're getting to us, but we know that they are, and we aren't shocked by it. Sometimes we even relish it. (For example, Super Bowl commercials are nearly as much of a draw as the game itself). Yet one can still find it to be insidious. When it comes to politics, especially this last go-round, the deployment of persuasive arts has big consequences.
I can easily recommend this to fans of Mad Men who've an interest in the psychology of the times. However, grammar hounds beware. I had two different editions at various times, both published by Ig Publishing. The editions were rife with typos -- everything from misspellings to the obviously wrong word or even a word missing from a sentence. I found it pretty annoying, though it seemed to be limited to about one per page. Clocking in at 240 pages, that's 240 typos, which is inexcusable, and I can't be persuaded otherwise.
Of course a lot has changed in sixty years. For one thing, we're not quite as naive about advertisers. We may not always know how they're getting to us, but we know that they are, and we aren't shocked by it. Sometimes we even relish it. (For example, Super Bowl commercials are nearly as much of a draw as the game itself). Yet one can still find it to be insidious. When it comes to politics, especially this last go-round, the deployment of persuasive arts has big consequences.
I can easily recommend this to fans of Mad Men who've an interest in the psychology of the times. However, grammar hounds beware. I had two different editions at various times, both published by Ig Publishing. The editions were rife with typos -- everything from misspellings to the obviously wrong word or even a word missing from a sentence. I found it pretty annoying, though it seemed to be limited to about one per page. Clocking in at 240 pages, that's 240 typos, which is inexcusable, and I can't be persuaded otherwise.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews