The Hidden Persuaders

239 Pages·2007·9.16 MB·English

by  Vance Packard

Vance Packard
With an Introduction by Mark Crispin Miller
PUBLISHING
Brooklyn, New York
Copyright © 1957, 1980 by Vance Packard
Originally published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Introduction Copyright 2007© by Mark Crispin Miller
All rights reserved.
Printed in Canada
Reissue Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without
written permission of the publisher.
Please direct inquiries to:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Packard, Vance Oakley, 1914-
The hidden persuaders / Vance Packard ; [new] introduction by Mark
Crispin Miller.
p. cm.
Originally published in 1957 by McKay and reissued in 1980 by Pocket
Books with
a new afterword.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9788431-0-6
ISBN-10: 0-9788431-0-X
1. Advertising--Psychological aspects. 2. Consumers--Psychology. 3. Ad-
vertising,
Political. 4. Propaganda. 5. Control (Psychology) I. Title.
HF5822.P3 2007
659.101'9--dc22
2007027043
To Virginia

CONTENTS
Introduction by Mark Crispin Miller 9
1. The Depth Approach 31
PERSUADING US AS CONSUMERS
Z. The Trouble With People 37
3. So Ad Men become Depth Men 46
4. ....And The Hooks Are Lowered 58
5. Self-Images for Everybody 65
6. RX for Our Secret Distresses 74
1. Marketing Eight Hidden Needs 86
8. The Built-In Sexual Overtone 95
9. Back to the Breast, and Beyond 106
10. Babes In Consumerland 112
11. Class and Caste in the Salesroom 119
12. Selling Symbols to Upward Strivers 126
13. Cures for Our Hidden Aversions 136
14. Coping with Our Pesky Inner Ear 146
15. The Psycho-Seduction of Children 153
16. New Frontiers for Recruiting Customers 161
PERSUADING US AS CITIZENS
17. Politics and the Image Builders 171
18. Molding "Team Players" for Free Enterprise 188
19. The Engineered Yes 200
20. Care And Feeding Of Positive Thinkers 208
21. The Packaged Soul? 214
IN RETROSPECT
22. The Question of Validity 221
23. The Question of Morality 231

INTRODUCTION
by Mark Crispin Miller
The history of America since the Civil War is, in large part, a history
of conquest by commercial advertising. The decades have seen more
and more of it, appearing in more places than it ever was before, with
more and more of it more brilliantly designed, and more efficiently
compressed, and more ingeniously disguised as something else. Thus
more and more of it has passed into our hearts and minds without
our seeing it or knowing it (a feature of the most effective propagan-
da); and its appeals and promises have been devised with ever more
sophistication, and with ever greater subtlety implanted deep inside
our heads. In short, the modern history of America is, in large part,
the history of an ever-rising flood of corporate propaganda—and
also of our various responses to it, as We the People have obscurely
struggled to reverse it, or resist it, or to live our lives in spite of it, or
have simply let it carry us away.
For over a century, there have been many works diversely criti-
cal of that commercial tide—books and articles and films assailing
its unsightliness, intrusiveness, false claims, deceptive offers, moral
crudeness, idiotic language, poisonous effects on public health, sly
approaches to small children, non-stop sexist fantasy, casual racism,
creed of selfishness and catastrophic impact on the world's ecol-
ogy, etc. It is a highly edifying literature; and yet very few of those
quixotic works have moved the public. In 1927, crusading journal-
ist Stuart Chase and engineer Frederick J. Schlink came out with
Your Money's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollars, a
powerful exposé of the countless little frauds routinely perpetrated
on Americans by corporate manufacturers, whose ads hid more than
they revealed. (In 1925, Chase had taken aim directly at commercial
10 The Hidden Persuaders
advertising in his first book, Tragedy of Waste.) The book was a politi-
cal sensation, starting a new chapter in the history of mass activism.
"The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the consumer movement," as one admirer
later put it, Chase and Schlink's book led to the founding, in 1929,
of Consumer Research, Inc., the first group of its kind, and a crucial
stimulus for later, bolder organizing.'
And yet no popular critique of advertising moved the public,
or changed their view of that essential corporate craft, as deeply or
enduringly as Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders. Although it
had no obvious political effects (nor did its author call for any), this
anomalous exposé encouraged a new mass attentiveness to all of
modern marketing, the ads included—a critical alertness, or height-
ened wariness, that is still perceptible (albeit less prevalent) today.
Not that advertising had been much esteemed or trusted prior to
the publication of this book. From the Twenties, and especially since
the Great Depression, "Madison Avenue" had been about as popu-
lar as smoker's cough. What Packard did was educate, and thereby
heighten, that common animus, by illuminating what he called "the
depth approach" that had overtaken corporate marketing since World
War II. "Large-scale efforts are being made, often with impressive
success," Packard notes, correctly, in his opening paragraph,
to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions,
and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned
from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these ef-
forts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the
appeals which move us are often, in a sense, "hidden."
Although it had no obvious political effect, The Hidden Persuaders
made a difference in the public's concept of commercial suasion. For-
merly—i.e., from the Twenties into the mid-Fifties—advertising had
been generally conceived as a coercive din, drummed up everywhere
to browbeat, addle and/or mesmerize the masses into squandering
their hard-earned wages on a lot of glittering junk. Such "bunk" or
"ballyhoo" was the obvious and abrasive work of "hucksters," high-
paid bunko artists working in the circus mode of P.T. Barnum, and yet
advantaged by a range of marvelous new propaganda media—from
neon to rotogravure to radio to cinema, etc.—that Barnum never
Introduction 11
had a chance to use. Thus, before the coming of Vance Packard's
expose, the public, insofar as they thought much about it, tended to
see advertising as an endless con, all half-truths and hyperbole and
outright lies. That casually cynical perception was reflected back in
various satiric bits and censures in the post-war years: Cary Grant
in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, agonizing over copy for
WHAM Ham (1948, based on Eric Hodgins' novel of two years
before); Lucy getting plastered doing several takes of a TV commer-
cial for Vitameatavegamin, a bogus tonic spiked with alcohol (1952);
Roy Norr's "Cancer by the Carton," the famous article assailing the
tobacco companies for glamorizing toxic wares (which Reader's Di-
gest published twice in 1952); and so on.
As Hodgins' (gentle) barb makes clear, it was not just the public
that saw advertising as an overload of bunk. Many in the advertis-
ing industry also regarded their profession as a giant rip-off. Hence
the definitive self-contempt of such literary heroes as Mr. Blandings,
who, as one of many "hard-working, highly competent, deeply mis-
erable men who wrote advertising copy," Hodgins writes, "loathed
his calling with a deep, passionate intensity." (Having labored as a
2
writer at, editor for, and publisher of Fortune, Hodgins had known
many ad men.) What made that sort of work despicable, especially
for anyone with democratic notions, was its treatment of Ameri-
cans en masse according to the mechanistic tenets of old-fashioned
crowd psychology—an angry inside view that would from time to
time receive a national hearing.
"Remember, two things make good advertising," counsels Evan
Evans, the monstrous hand-soap magnate in The Hucksters, Fred-
eric Wakeman's best-selling novel of 1946 (and the basis of a Clark
Gable vehicle released by MGM in 1947)
"One, a good simple idea. Two, repetition. And by repeti-
tion, by God, I mean until the public is so irritated with it,
they'll buy your brand because they bloody well can't forget
it. All you professional advertising men are scared the death
of raping the public; I say the public likes it, if you got the
know-how to make 'em relax and enjoy it."
Although Evans is a loathsome character—based on George Wash-