The Hidden Persuaders

Packard, a journalist, reported on the adoption of psychological research by American advertisers and marketers in the 1950s, drawing on trade press, on interviews and on the published work of the researchers themselves.

The practice he describes is motivational research, associated most closely with Ernest Dichter, a Vienna-trained psychologist who applied psychoanalytic methods to consumer behaviour. The technique used depth interviews, projective tests and clinical interpretation to identify unconscious motives behind purchases, on the premise that people do not know why they buy and that stated reasons are rationalisations. Packard reports the resulting findings as the practitioners stated them: that a convertible functions as a symbolic mistress while the buyer purchases a sedan, that cake mixes sold better when the housewife had to add an egg because complete convenience produced guilt, that insurance sales work through the buyer's desire for posthumous importance, and that soap and cleaning products connect to guilt.

He extends the argument to politics, reporting the use of the same methods in the 1952 and 1956 campaigns, and to the deliberate cultivation of consumption through planned obsolescence and status appeals.

The book's argument is that these techniques manipulate people below the level of conscious choice, which raises a question about autonomy that Packard treats as serious.

Much of the underlying research was weak. Motivational research fell out of favour by the 1960s as psychoanalytic method lost credibility and as quantitative survey and experimental methods displaced it. Some of Packard's specific claims, particularly around subliminal advertising, rest on a demonstration that was later admitted to be fabricated. The book remains valuable as a historical document showing when and how marketing began treating consumer psychology as an engineering problem.