Wednesday, Aug 27, 2008
Nearly 50 years ago, sociologist Vance Packard shocked the nation with "The Hidden Persuaders," a stinging indictment of advertisers' attempts to massage and mold our inner thoughts, fears and dreams for profit. The slim volume, with its unsettling portraits of slimy "depth men" rooting about in the consumer subconscious, provoked widespread outrage. "We have reached the sad age when minds and not just houses can be broken and entered," concluded the New Yorker. Thundered the Saturday Evening Post: "The subconscious mind is the most delicate part of the most delicate apparatus in the entire universe ... It is not to be smudged, sullied or twisted in order to boost the sales of popcorn or anything else."
Hearings were held, legislation was introduced -- though never passed -- and "motivation researchers" Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter, both former academics who had used the tools of psychiatry and the social sciences to support the admen in their trickery, were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. By 1959, Packard himself had cause for confidence that the mind-molders and psycho-probers whose tactics he had exposed would soon be consigned to the dustbin of marketing history. "Eventually -- say, by A.D. 2000 -- all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old-fashioned," chuckled the sociologist in a preface to the paperback edition.
Of course, it hasn't quite worked out that way. In fashionable marketing circles, it has become acceptable again to speak openly about harnessing consumers' brain waves for commercial ends. These days, the marketing history of the 1950s is being relived as farce, as corporations fall over themselves to spelunk the minds of shoppers, and a new generation of depth men seizes on the subconscious as prime territory for subliminal appeals.
A charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm. "It's a very competitive environment out there," says Dr. Sam Cohen, president of PsychoLogics, a New York-based brand consultancy. "I don't think the market has ever been so flooded with brands. Companies realize that if they can't own a piece of the consumer's mind, they won't make it today." Cohen has deployed his proprietary technique, which he cheerfully refers to as the "Psychological Probe," for a range of clients, including Toyota, Northwest Airlines and General Foods. "I'm an ego psychologist, a post-Freudian analyst," Cohen says, adding with pardonable pride, "I go where Freud would have gone if he had lived. I've developed my own model, my own way of tapping into the subconscious processes." As an specialist in object-relations theory, Cohen says, he considers himself especially well-positioned to probe the purchasing decisions of consumers. "Object relations theory is all about learning about the self in relation to the object world," he explains. "The original object, of course, would be the mommy." Brands, he says, "fit beautifully into the theory of object relations. Brands carry with them symbolic meanings or unconscious meanings, which the consumer can then use for his own well-being."
Cohen's clients love it. "It gives them such an advantage over their competitors," Cohen tells me. "When they own the consumer mind -- when they create such a perfect fit with her underlying identity needs -- they become that much more powerful ... It's fascinating to see how far companies have come in recognizing that."
Hal Goldberg, the California-based hypnotist who conducted the focus groups for Shell, agrees that today's far-seeing executive will route all appeals through the consumer subconscious. "The issues that people have with brands are so deep-seated," he says. "If I can get people to go back in time, go back to when they first experienced the brand and the category, I might find something that a client can make use of ... Perhaps there's something about the first experience with the category that affects adult behavior. If my client knows that, and their competitors don't, they might be able to penetrate that intense imprinted memory and make a sale."
The old tools of the subliminal hard sell -- skin probes, galvanometers, high-speed tachistoscopes urging movie patrons to "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" -- had about them the distinct whiff of hucksterism. In contrast, the new-style methods boast a faddish academic gloss. The literature of the new, highbrow brand consultancies bristles with references to "emergent codes," "meaning systems" and "syncretic nonlinearity." In marketing departments across America, cheerful maxims about teamwork have given way to po-mo apergus. "Put Your Own Subjectivity On the Line!" exhorts a wall poster at DDB-Needham Worldwide, a New York-based advertising agency. "It's the only way into the Other's subjectivity!" Another consultancy informs prospective clients that "Consumers are Made, not Born ... Any brand that doesn't exploit the 'Normalizing Ideology' is lost in 'cultural space.'"
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