Freud on Madison Avenue

Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America

Lawrence R. Samuel

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812204872
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

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.

1

The Psychology of Everyday Living

Have you ever noticed . . . that people never answer what you [ask]?

—G. K. Chesterton, “The Innocence of Father Brown”

One day in Vienna in 1930, the owners of a new laundry asked Paul Lazarsfeld, a psychology instructor at the city’s famed university, to help them increase their business. Many Austrian women were reluctant to send out their laundry, the instructor learned, as they thought that doing so reduced their role as proper hausfrau. In interviewing existing customers, the psychologist learned that women who did use the laundry often first sent out their wash when an “emergency” occurred, such as a child becoming sick or houseguests unexpectedly dropping in. Once experiencing the joy of having someone else do their wash, however, the women were usually hooked, and became regular customers. This particular insight led the psychologist to suggest that the owners of the laundry send a letter describing the services of the business to every household in which a family member had recently died, knowing that the bereaved would find it difficult to do their own wash. The owners of the store tried the idea, and business instantly picked up, lighting a spark under a new kind of research that over the next few decades would revolutionize global consumer culture.¹

The Accidental Researcher

Paul Lazarsfeld’s clever, if ethically ambiguous, use of what he called the “psychological approach” to studying consumer behavior revealed the indisputable value of what would soon be called motivation (or motivational) research. Although he is hardly a household name, Lazarsfeld was one of the most important figures in the history of advertising and marketing, and his approach to gleaning information from consumers is much like the way it is still done today. Pioneering “the analysis of the complex web of reasons and motives that determines the goal strivings of human actions,” Lazarsfeld was, according to Lewis A. Coser, “the father of sophisticated studies of mass communication.” A disciple of Alfred Adler (his mother was a prominent Adlerian psychotherapist), Lazarsfeld absorbed the ideas of this most sociological of Freud’s followers, creating a new, hybrid form of social science in the process. His most famous study, The Unemployed Workers of Marienthal, completed when he was a young man in Vienna, was an early attempt to quantify sociological fieldwork, a once radical pursuit that he would be obsessed with for the rest of his career.²

Although a devout socialist, a quite typical affiliation among Viennese intellectuals between the wars, Lazarsfeld ironically found himself in the market research business when he needed to fund his Wirtschafts Psychologisches Institut (Psycho-Economic Institute), a center studying economic problems in Austria. “We were concerned with why our propaganda was unsuccessful,” the former member of the Socialist Student Movement remembered years later, “and wanted to conduct psychological studies to explain it.”³ With its depth interviews and analysis drawing from sociology, psychology, and psychoanalysis, the institute almost accidentally found itself doing what were probably the most progressive market studies in the world in the 1930s. These studies were the beginnings of motivation research, something that one of Lazarsfeld’s students—Ernest Dichter—would bring to the United States and, in the process, change the course of American business.

Lazarsfeld’s inauspicious work with the Viennese laundry in 1930 would soon lead to much bigger things. That same year, Lazarsfeld offered to help a group of Americans in the city “promote the use of applied psychology among business” and conducted a series of interviews with people regarding their preferences of soap and what was perhaps the first survey of radio listeners. Regarding the latter, Lazarsfeld was interested in, as Anthony Heilbut wrote, “what kind of people listened to what kind of programs for what kind of reasons,” this another seedling that would sprout into motivation research. “The commercial applications were evident,” Heilbut noted, and marketers of perfume and chocolate were eager to apply Lazarsfeld’s findings. Working-class radio listeners in Austria preferred both strong perfume and chocolate, Lazarsfeld discovered, speculating that the reason for this was that their economic condition made them “starved for pleasure.” This kind of neo-Freudian interpretation would define motivation research over the next few decades as intellectual descendants of Lazarsfeld kept Viennese psychology alive and well.⁴

After arriving in the United States in 1933 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Lazarsfeld chose to make America his home as the Nazis rose to power in Europe. (The success of his Marienthal study, with its socialist agenda, had attracted the attention of the police, another factor contributing to his decision to leave Austria while he could.) As a self-proclaimed “Marxist on leave,” Lazarsfeld’s arrival in the States in the thirties was particularly fortuitous, his own politics matching up nicely with FDR’s New Deal progressive reforms. After a brief stint at the University of Newark (now Rutgers University), Lazarsfeld started working for an up-and-coming executive at CBS, Frank Stanton, who would eventually become president of the network. With Stanton, who also had a Ph.D. in psychology, Lazarsfeld found himself doing the same kind of radio research in New York that he had done in Vienna, spelling out his mission in a 1935 article cowritten with Arthur Kornhauser. Via “a systematic view of how people’s marketing behavior is motivated,” the psychologist turned market researcher wrote in “The Analysis of Consumer Actions,” companies could “forecast and control consumer behavior,” an idea nothing less than revolutionary in the mid-1930s. Lazarsfeld, admittedly more interested in exploring new methodologies in the social sciences than in selling products or candidates, nevertheless had become not just an agent of consumerism but one of its leading visionaries.⁵

Lazarsfeld’s introduction of psychology-based, in-depth market research made a giant splash in a field in which counting bodies was the height of sophistication. Within a year of his arrival in the States, Lazarsfeld recalled, “the small fraternity of commercial market research experts got interested in my work” and invited him to talk at meetings and serve on committees of the brand-new American Marketing Association. In addition, the AMA asked Lazarsfeld to write several chapters for a new textbook it planned to publish, The Techniques of Marketing Research. One of the chapters contained references to depth psychology and is thus credited as the official beginning of motivation research.⁶ The man who was, according to Heilbut, “a product of refined European learning who hustled himself a position in the marketplace,” soon landed a job with the Rockefeller-subsidized Office of Radio Research at Princeton (which moved to Columbia University in 1939 and five years later was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research). There Lazarsfeld, along with a team of notable psychologists (including his second wife, Herta Herzog, another Adlerian, and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt school), reigned for decades, surveying radio listeners for ad agencies and sponsors.⁷

Again, with his move to Princeton, Lazarsfeld was in the right place at the right time. Market research was in a decidedly crude state and interest in surveying radio listeners was just beginning, making advertisers very receptive to innovative methodologies directly lifted from the social sciences. The kind of systematic interviewing done in classic sociological studies like Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown and Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City, for example, was exactly what was needed to advance market research beyond simple “nosecounting.”⁸ “Our idea was to try to determine . . . the role of radio in the lives of different types of listeners, the value of radio to people psychologically, and the various reasons why they like it,” Lazarsfeld explained. The whopping salary of $7,000 that came with the Princeton job was an offer he couldn’t refuse. At the university, he consulted with some of the leading psychoanalysts of the day (including Karen Horney and Erich Fromm) to satisfy his curiosity about the role of radio in their patients’ lives. “Can Freudian theory elucidate the entertainment value of radio and account for some especially successful programs?” Lazarsfeld asked the noted analysts; this convergence of social research with psychoanalytical case studies was unheard of in 1937.⁹

Lazarsfeld wasn’t the only one in the 1930s using psychological theory to solve marketing problems, however. In 1935, for example, Donald Laird identified what he considered “irrational” behavior among purchasing agents, claiming that their tough negotiating was not so much about saving money for their company as a way to boost their own egos.¹⁰ A couple of Lazarsfeld’s colleagues, Hadley Cantril and Rensis Likert, were also “important links between academic culture and the applied research of business and government,” according to Jean Converse, and the three constituted a powerful troika of “survey research entrepreneurs.” Unlike most other academics in the social sciences, these men were eager to venture outside the ivory tower, finding the emerging world of polls and surveys quite valuable to their work. While Cantril focused on polling and Likert would go on to develop his famous rating scale, Lazarsfeld stayed true to his roots in the Viennese school of motivation research, applying Freudian and Adlerian theory to the real world of consumer behavior. At the core of the school’s thinking was what was referred to as “psychologically correct” questioning to identify the role that unconscious motivations played in buying things—hence “motivation research,” or what Converse described as the exploration of “underlying motives, observation of involuntary actions, and free association of ideas and concepts.”¹¹

As his principal heir in the Viennese school, Ernest Dichter, would do on a much grander scale, Lazarsfeld brought an intellectual component to market research that was missing from the field in the 1930s and 1940s. Consumers’ purchase decisions were as complex as any, he felt, entirely worth studying in detail. Lazarsfeld’s 1935 article “The Art of Asking Why in Marketing Research” became a classic, a convincing argument that standard questionnaires were simply not revealing why consumers did the things they did. In the article, Lazarsfeld identified what he called “buyer behavior determinants of the first degree,” which included not just a product’s attributes but also consumers’ emotional likes and dislikes. There were also “buyer behavior determinants of the second degree,” consisting of the reasons for consumers’ likes and dislikes, which were unknown.¹² Lazarsfeld, however, was determined to discover them. “A careful collection of opinions is far superior to pseudo-scholarly tabulations of the type of statistics which have only a remote relationship to the special problem under investigation,” he wrote in another article a couple of years later, rebranding himself as a sociologist rather than a psychologist, because the former was more like a market researcher. At Columbia, students felt “they were in on the ground floor of an enterprise that believed it was about to remake social science, if not the world,” remembered one of them, Seymour Martin Lipset, who, like many on Lazarsfeld’s team, would go on to become a giant in the field.¹³

Although Lazarsfeld’s trailblazing work in market research was remarkable enough, an even bigger contribution may have been his role in bringing together the previously separate worlds of academia and business. In a 1941 talk to the National Association of Broadcasters, Lazarsfeld made it clear that “communication research [was now a] joint enterprise between industries and universities,” a way for academics to fund their work and an opportunity for American companies (like his clients CBS and the ad agency McCann-Erickson) to achieve their ambitious objectives. “The great innovation was the decision that contract work would be permitted,” he wrote decades later, speaking of his bosses at Princeton and Columbia, “a real turning point in the history of American universities.”¹⁴ Lazarsfeld’s own work focusing on identifying commonalities among people who shared opinions—to find out not just what individuals thought but if they formed a social group of some kind—was the stuff of marketers’ dreams. Out of this kind of leading-edge research came, for example, Lazarsfeld’s notion of “opinion leaders,” that certain people shaped the views of the “masses”—this more than a half-century before Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.¹⁵ “Thanks largely to his work, mechanical systems of observation could chart everything from voting preferences to tastes in mouthwash and deodorant,” concluded Heilbut, the accidental researcher forging an entirely new way to understand the American consumer.¹⁶

The Public Pulse

An entirely new way to understand the American consumer would turn out to be exactly what American business needed after World War II. Much less than knowing consumers’ unconscious reasons for buying or not buying things, business executives had precious little understanding of the most basic marketing issues, the first being whether there was a market at all. Immediately after the war, some corporations became determined to discover how big the postwar market for consumer goods would be, “a question that keeps many a manufacturer awake at night,” as Business Week described it in 1946. While companies retooled to “turn guns into butter,” as the saying went, shelves remained mostly empty, giving marketers no information about how much product companies should make or how much they might sell. Economic and social conditions were quite different after the war, making prewar numbers unreliable, managers believed.¹⁷

One company, for example, Silex, went the extra mile to try to figure out how many coffeemakers it should make, doing some innovative market research in Peoria, Illinois, which was then considered the most average of American communities. (Peoria replaced another Midwestern town, Muncie, Indiana—the subject of Robert and Helen Lynd’s two Middletown studies—as what Charles McGovern called “a divining rod of dominant public sentiment.”)¹⁸ Silex flooded Peoria with all the coffeemakers it could produce and then waited to see how long consumers would keep buying them, the key question being whether sales would be good not just during the expected initial “boom” period but for months after. Most companies believed Americans would buy anything and everything they could for some time after the war, having been deprived of most consumer products for half a decade. The company happily learned that sales of their coffeemakers kept percolating for the duration of their market test, news that “should cheer other manufacturers who are wondering how substantial their present order backlog really is.”¹⁹

Silex wasn’t the only company pursuing some interesting market research soon after the war to figure out what to do next. In 1947, for example, Ford gave consumers the chance to design a new car on paper (something more typical of today’s “relationship marketing”), even asking them what they would pay for their dream automobile. Learning that consumers now wanted a lot more choices when it came to styling, colors, comfort, and safety than they did before the war, Ford realized it had a major gap between its research and sales departments and decided to do something about it. H. D. Everett, Jr., was quickly snatched up from Time, Inc., recruited to head up a seventeen-person research department at Ford created to “keep a finger on the public pulse.” Besides farming out work to a number of suppliers, the market research department within the sales department also partnered with academics who were doing intriguing studies related to the driving experience. Anthropologists and anatomists at the University of Michigan were studying dashboard design, for example, and researchers at Northwestern University were looking into how and when drivers became fatigued. Ford was especially interested in how research findings differed by gender, fully aware that automobiles were designed for men and that, as Business Week reported the company’s thinking, “maybe they should be changed to suit women too.” Women from the Detroit area were brought to Dearborn to weigh in on issues of...