The Hidden Persuaders
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VANCE PACKARD THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS LONGMANS, GREEN & CO LONDON • NEW YORK • TORONTO LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO LTD 6 & 7 CLIFFORD STREET LONDON W I THIBAULT HOUSE THIBAULT SQUARE CAPE TOWN 605-611 LONSDALE STREET MELBOURNE LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO INC 55 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 3 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO 20 CRANFIELD ROAD TORONTO 16 ORIENT LONGMANS PRIVATE LTD CALCUTTA BOMBAY MADRAS DELHI HYDERABAD DACCA This edition first published 1957 Second impression 1957 Printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone (Printers) Ltd., London, N.W.10 To Virginia Contents CHAPTER 1. THE DEPTH APPROACH PERSUADING US AS CONSUMERS 2. THE TROUBLE WITH PEOPLE 3. So AD MEN BECOME DEPTH MEN 4. AND THE HOOKS ARE LOWERED 5. SELF-IMAGES FOR EVERYBODY 6. Rx FOR OUR SECRET DISTRESSES 7. MARKETING EIGHT HIDDEN NEEDS 8. THE BUILT-IN SEXUAL OVERTONE 9. BACK TO THE BREAST, AND BEYOND 10. BABES IN CONSUMERLAND 11. CLASS AND CASTE IN THE SALESROOM 12. SELLING SYMBOLS TO UPWARD STRIVERS 13. CURES FOR OUR HIDDEN AVERSIONS 14. COPING WITH OUR PESKY INNER EAR 15. THE PSYCHO-SEDUCTION OF CHILDREN 16. NEW FRONTIERS FOR RECRUITING CUSTOMERS PERSUADING US AS CITIZENS 17. POLITICS AND THE IMAGE BUILDERS 18. MOLDING "TEAM PLAYERS" FOR FREE ENTERPRISE 19. THE ENGINEERED YES 20. CARE AND FEEDING OF POSITIVE THINKERS 21. THE PACKAGED SOUL? IN RETROSPECT 22. THE QUESTION OF VALIDITY 23. THE QUESTION OF MORALITY INDEX TO BRITISH READERS WHILE some of the research for this book came from British sources it was gathered predominantly in the United States because that is where I happen to live and also because that is where manipulation of the public has taken hold most firmly. Americans have become the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain. This book, I believe, will bear me out. However you have little ground for complacency. Manipulation by playing upon the public's subconscious is clearly spreading. Most of the major American enthusiasts of the depth approach to selling products and ideas do business with the British public too and will certainly turn their attention to you, if they haven't already. Furthermore, as Chapter 4 indicates, Britain has some home-grown manipulators. The possibilities of using the insights of psychiatry and the social sciences to influence our choices and our behaviour are so inviting that no one anywhere can be sure nowadays that he is not being worked upon by the depth persuaders. 7. The Depth Approach This book is an attempt to explore a strange and rather exotic new area of modern life. It is about the way many of us are being influenced and manipulated—far more than we realize—in the patterns of our everyday lives. Large-scale efforts are being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, "hidden." Some of the manipulating being attempted is simply amusing. Some of it is disquieting, particularly when viewed as a portent of what may be ahead on a more intensive and effective scale for us all. Co-operative scientists have come along providentially to furnish some awesome tools. The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry. Professional persuaders have seized upon it in their groping for more effective ways to sell us their wares—whether products, ideas, attitudes, candidates, goals, or states of mind. This depth approach to influencing our behavior is being used in many fields and is employing a variety of ingenious techniques. It is being used most extensively to affect our daily acts of consumption. The sale to us of billions of dollars' worth of United States products is being significantly affected, if not revolutionized, by this approach, which is still only barely out of its infancy. Two thirds of America's hundred largest advertisers have geared campaigns to this depth approach by using strategies inspired by what marketers call "motivation analysis." Meanwhile, many of the nation's leading public-relations experts have been indoctrinating themselves in the lore of psychiatry and the social sciences in order to increase their skill at "engineering" our consent to their propositions. Fund raisers are turning to the depth approach to wring more money from us. A considerable and growing number of our industrial concerns (including some of the largest) are seeking to sift and mold the behavior of their personnel—particularly their own executives—by using psychiatric and psychological techniques. Finally, this depth approach is showing up nationally in the professional politicians' intensive use of symbol manipulation and reiteration on the voter, who more and more is treated like Pavlov's conditioned dog. The efforts of the persuaders to probe our everyday habits for hidden meanings are often interesting purely for the flashes of revelation they offer us of ourselves. We are frequently revealed, in their findings, as comical actors in a genial if twitchy Thurberian world. The findings of the depth probers provide startling explanations for many of our daily habits and perversities. It seems that our subconscious can be pretty wild and unruly. What the probers are looking for, of course, are the whys of our behavior, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favor. This has led them to probe why we are afraid of banks; why we love those big fat cars; why we really buy homes; why men smoke cigars; why the kind of car we draw reveals the brand of gasoline we will buy; why housewives typically fall into a hypnoidal trance when they get into a supermarket; why men are drawn into auto showrooms by convertibles but end up buying sedans; why junior loves cereal that pops, snaps, and crackles. We move from the genial world of James Thurber into the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother, however, as we explore some of the extreme attempts at probing and manipulating now going on. Certain of the probers, for example, are systematically feeling out our hidden weaknesses and frailties in the hope that they can more efficiently influence our behavior. At one of the largest advertising agencies in America psychologists on the staff are probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness, and so on. A Chicago advertising agency has been studying the housewife's menstrual cycle and its psychological concomitants in order to find the appeals that will be more effective in selling her certain food products. Seemingly, in the probing and manipulating nothing is immune or sacred. The same Chicago ad agency has used psychiatric probing techniques on little girls. Public-relations experts are advising churchmen how they can become more effective manipulators of their congregations. In some cases these persuaders even choose our friends for us, as at a large "community of tomorrow" in Florida. Friends are furnished along with the linen by the management in offering the homes for sale. Everything comes in one big, glossy package. Somber examples of the new persuaders in action are appearing not only in merchandising but in politics and industrial relations. The national chairman of a political party indicated his merchandising approach to the election of 1956 by talking of his candidates as products to sell. In many industrial concerns now the administrative personnel are psychoanalyzed, and their futures all charted, by trained outside experts. And then there is the trade school in California that boasts to employers that it socially engineers its graduates so that they are, to use the phrase of an admiring trade journal, "custom-built men" guaranteed to have the right attitudes from the employer's standpoint. What the persuaders are trying to do in many cases was well summed up by one of their leaders, the president of the Public Relations Society of America, when he said in an address to members: "The stuff with which we work is the fabric of men's minds." In many of their attempts to work over the fabric of our minds the professional persuaders are receiving direct help and guidance from respected social scientists. Several social-science professors at Columbia University, for example, took part in a seminar at the university attended by dozens of New York public- relations experts. In the seminar one professor, in a sort of chalk talk, showed these manipulators precisely the types of mental manipulation they could attempt with most likelihood of success. All this probing and manipulation has its constructive and its amusing aspects; but also, I think it fair to say, it has seriously antihumanistic implications. Much of it seems to represent regress rather than progress for man in his long struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being. Something new, in fact, appears to be entering the pattern of American life with the growing power of our persuaders. In the imagery of print, film, and air wave the typical American citizen is commonly depicted as an uncommonly shrewd person. He or she is dramatized as a thoughtful voter, rugged individualist, and, above all, as a careful, hardheaded consumer of the wondrous products of American enterprise. He is, in short, the flowering of twentieth-century progress and enlightenment. Most of us like to fit ourselves into this picture, and some of us surely are justified in doing so. The men and women who hold up these glowing images, particularly the professional persuaders, typically do so, however, with tongue in cheek.