Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America

by Lawrence R. Samuel

What do consumers really want? In the mid-twentieth century, many marketing executives sought to answer this question by looking to the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. By the 1950s, Freudian psychology had become the adman's most powerful new tool, promising to plumb the depths of shoppers' subconscious minds to access the irrational desires beneath their buying decisions. That the unconscious was the key to consumer behavior was a new idea in the field of advertising, and its impact was felt beyond the commercial realm. Centered on the fascinating lives of the brilliant men and women who brought psychoanalytic theories and practices from Europe to Madison Avenue and, ultimately, to Main Street, Freud on Madison Avenue tells the story of how midcentury advertisers changed American culture. Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, James Vicary, Alfred Politz, Pierre Martineau, and the father of motivation research, Viennese-trained psychologist Ernest Dichter, adapted techniques from sociology, anthropology, and psychology to help their clients market consumer goods. Many of these researchers had fled the Nazis in the 1930s, and their decidedly Continental and intellectual perspectives on secret desires and inner urges sent shockwaves through WASP-dominated postwar American culture and commerce. Though popular, these qualitative research and persuasion tactics were not without critics in their time. Some of the tools the motivation researchers introduced, such as the focus group, are still in use, with "consumer insights" and "account planning" direct descendants of Freudian psychological techniques. Looking back, author Lawrence R. Samuel implicates Dichter's positive spin on the pleasure principle in the hedonism of the Baby Boomer generation, and he connects the acceptance of psychoanalysis in marketing culture to the rise of therapeutic culture in the United States.

Genres: Psychology

232 pages, Hardcover

First published April 22, 2010

About the author

Lawrence R. Samuel is the founder of Culture Planning LLC, a Miami– and New York–based resource offering cultural insight to Fortune 500 organizations. He is the author of The End of the Innocence: The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair, Future: A Recent History, Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture, Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America, Supernatural America: A Cultural History, and a number of other books.

Reviews

[Carla Remy · Rating 5 out of 5]

12/2010

Wow. I was so excited to find this book, as I have long been interested in the use of psychology in advertising. I was not disappointed. I liked Samuel's writing, not even dry. He mainly focuses on Ernest Dichter, Motivation Research and the whole silly scandal of subliminal messaging. There were a lot of fascinating facts and it is definitely a book I'll keep around.

[Homa]

The title is a bit misleading, because Freud himself doesn’t really show up in this book. What I found instead was a history of the moment when American advertisers leaned on half-digested and often distorted bits of psychoanalysis to make their work look scientific. A lot of the examples felt more like clever storytelling or guesswork than actual research, but even so, they managed to create this public fear that advertising could sneak into the unconscious and pull the strings.
What I enjoyed most was seeing where and how the roots of today’s psychologically driven advertising were planted. Reading it gave me that constant feeling of "aha, so this is where it all began." It’s not a deep analysis of psychoanalysis itself, but rather a clear historical snapshot of how advertising and consumer psychology first got tangled together.

[Duncan Berry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reasonable effort at grasping the MR phase in the development of modern market research.

Back when I "discovered" Dichter about eight years ago, I ran through several of his books in a matter of weeks. I thought his Strategy of Desire was excellent, head and shoulders above the rest, even though it was peddling a piebald materialism as consumer therapy; I didn't like it then, and I like it even less now. And whatever sliver of Freudian theory survived my exposure to Jeffery Masson back in the '80s was pulverized by Dichter's clumsy handling of the psyche. Nevertheless, Dichter's notion of "constructive discontent" — completely ignored by this author — remains a valuable insight and anticipates the neuroeconomic findings of George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon, especially his 2007 article on "Neural Predictors of Purchase," in which he notices that insular deactivation precedes purchase. In layman's terms, we need to experience a negative emotion that requires correction in order to generate the emotional, precognitive experience of "permission" before we make a purchase.

Honestly, I was hoping the book would end on more of this kind of note. As it is, it just devolved into a series of late-in-life anecdotes drawn largely from Dichter's autobiography. And this reminded me why, ultimately, I ended up simply walking away from the Dichter point of view — there's a grotesque vanity about it all.

Now, on the flip side, if you enjoy tidbits of marketing history — like I do — then you'll find a lot to enjoy in this book. With the exception of the author's increasing reliance on parenthetical indulgences as the book approaches the end, it is very well written and a pleasure to read.

[Rolando · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book to show some historical notes about advertising industry in USA. I actually enjoy the reading for historical facts, "new" books and studies of the time, and to understand a little more of the advertising influence in USA and other parts of the world.