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.
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