Book description
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.
"Pull up a couch. Open your mind to this incisive, intriguing
and intelligent revelation of how psychological analysis transformed
modern advertising."-John Bowman, Global Director of Strategic
Equities, Saatchi & Saatchi
Lawrence R. Samuel is the founder of Culture Planning LLC and the
author of several books, including Rich: The Rise and Fall of American
Wealth Culture and Future: A Recent History.
