The Birth of Mad Men: Ernest Dichter, Psychoanalysis and Consumerism

The Birth of Mad Men: Ernest Dichter, Psychoanalysis and Consumerism

First edition of The Psychology of Everyday Living by Ernest Dichter

First edition of The Psychology of Everyday Living by Ernest Dichter (1947).

Mid twentieth-century America. In a corporate board room, hazy with tobacco smoke and whiskey fumes, a man pitches innovative new advertising ideas.

Soap isn’t just for mundane hygiene issues, it’s associated with sensuality and should be marketed as sexy and refreshing.

Cigarettes aren’t just commodities, they’re rewards for a job well done, or a break from a stressful work day.

Car makers should promote their brands with convertibles because men associate them with freedom and the fantasy of having a mistress, even if they end up buying a sedan when they take their wife back to the dealership.

Mad Men’s Don Draper.

Don Draper, right? Now in its fifth season, Mad Men has reintroduced the American public to the advertising revolution that led companies away from spots extolling their product’s obvious uses to a new style targeting consumers’ unspoken desires. But the instigator of this movement was not a mysterious and dangerously sexy ad executive like Don Draper. He was a much more interesting figure who forever changed American consumerism.

Ernest Dichter (1907–91).

Ernest Dichter was born in Vienna in 1907 and following a severely impoverished childhood was employed in his uncle’s department store. Working as a window dresser, he became interested in marketing and introduced new American ideas into the shop, such as the use of music to soothe customers.

In 1938, following university training in psychology and informal training in psychoanalysis, he moved to New York with his wife and only $100 to his name. Dichter worked for a time with a traditional market-research firm, but in 1939 he sent a letter to six corporations in which he offered his understanding of psychoanalysis as a way to radically improve their marketing strategies. Four responded, and his first contract was for Ivory Soap. Using in-depth consumer interviews, he learned that when shoppers picked a particular brand,

“it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or ‘personality’ of the soap.

This was a big idea. Dichter understood that every product has an image, even a ‘soul’, and is bought not merely for the purpose it serves but for the values it seems to embody. Our possessions are extensions of our own personalities, which serve as a ‘kind of mirror which reflects our own image’. Dichter’s message to advertisers was: figure out the personality of a product, and you will understand how to market it” (The Economist).

Dichter’s belief in good marketing went beyond creating successful ads; it became a total philosophy. Profoundly affected by the turmoil he had experienced as a young man in Europe, he believed that consumerism was the only bulwark against totalitarianism. The public, he argued, must learn to stop feeling guilty. They must accept and fulfill their unconscious desires, or risk falling under the spell of communism or fascism.

In light of this, he wrote his first book for the general public. The Psychology of Everyday Living (BOOK SOLD), published in 1947, was

“designed as an accessible self-help manual to help Americans ‘accept the morality of the good life’… As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas” (Cabinet Magazine, issue 44, p. 30).

Chapters such as “The Magic of Soap”, “What Bread Means to You”, “How to Be Happy While Cooking”, and “The Psychology of Buying” purported to solve the problems of everyday life, but largely encouraged a positive attitude to consumption by stressing the good feelings associated with a new purchase or the use of a specific commodity.

The book is extensively illustrated, with images that promote consumerism even more blatantly than the text does. A photograph of a woman applying makeup is captioned “Cosmetics provide psychological therapy”, and another of a man trying on a hat reads, “The right kind of hat gives us dignity”.

In chapter after chapter, Dichter posits that consumer products can help us express our individuality, engage with the world in new ways, or simply provide a self-esteem boost:

The chapter on cigarettes argues that those who try to abstain from smoking are wrong to feel guilty about the habit. Dichter writes that,

“Efforts to reduce the amount of smoking signify a willingness to sacrifice pleasure in order to assuage their feeling of guilt… Guilt feelings may cause harmful physical effects not at all caused by the cigarettes used, which may be extremely mild. Such guilt feelings alone may be the real cause of the injurious consequences”.

One of the photographs used in this chapter has a decidedly sexual subtext:

Automobiles, according to Dichter, aren’t simply for running errands or getting to work. They’re about freedom, personal identity, youthful self-assertion, and, of course, sex.

Probably the best illustration is “What is bought depends on what the woman says”:

Though Dichter faced scrutiny from those who were wary of the corporate hold on Americans’ psyches, criticism only seemed to generate more converts. But his method did have faults, and executives in the early 60s began to feel that his ideas were sometimes too strange to be practical. Like Don Draper dismissing the psychoanalyst in the first episode of Mad Men, the director of a Pepsi campaign fired Dichter when he was told that ice shouldn’t be used in advertisements because it reminded consumers of death. At the the same time, the advent of accessible computing meant that firms were able to return to more scientific methods of researching consumer behaviour.  But Dichter remains the most important figure of twentieth-century advertising. Glance at the television or pass a billboard and you’ll recognise that the concepts he pioneered still dominate the advertising that surrounds us.

Resources:

 

Plasticine: Clean, Harmless and Ever Plastic

Plasticine: Clean, Harmless and Ever Plastic

 

Early ad for plasticine, 1899

Early ad for plasticine, 1899.

I found this ad in a copy of The Butterfly, a literary magazine published in London in March of 1899. This must be one of the very earliest ads for plasticine, which was invented in 1897 by an art instructor named William Harbutt. After teaching at the Royal College of Art he moved to Bath in 1874, where he founded his own academy, the Paragon School of Art. Harbutt noticed that many of his beginning students had difficulty using clay, which was heavy and often dried out before projects could be completed. In the search for a suitable alternative he began experimenting with different substances at home, involving the whole family and using a garden roller to squeeze excess water out of his concoctions. Harbutt perfected the formula in 1897 and began supplying it to his students, and then to other artists who heard of the material by word of mouth. But it was his grandchildren’s interest in the substance that convinced him he might have a successful toy in the making. The patent on plasticine was granted in 1899, so this must be one of the earliest ads for the new material, and I strongly suspect that the rather dour child in the photo is Harbutt’s grandson. Later Harbutt would hire the graphic designer John Hassell, who became famous for his commercial posters, to design colourful and eye-catching ads, as well as the plasticine packaging. Harbutt’s big break came when he was able to purchase an ad in a new publication called The Royal Magazine, which premiered in 1898. Unfortunately, I can’t determine whether that ad appeared before this one did. This ad is, in any case, a delightful bit of late-Victorian marketing, particularly the tagline “A capital present for any child either ‘Bright or Backward'”.

For further reading, the best place to go is probably the book companion to the BBC documentary series James May’s Toy Stories, which included an entire episode on plasticine. You can buy the book online, and the Google Books preview includes a number of the pages on the history of plasticine. As part of the documentary, May and a group of volunteers created a plasticine garden and entered it in the Chelsea Flower Show, which you can see here.

I did find an image of one other early ad for plasticine, though this one is much more sophisticated and probably several years later than ours. If you know of any others that have been digitised please do leave a comment!

So you want to go into the Donut Business?

So you want to go into the Donut Business?

Peter Harrington’s quirkiest recent acquisition, this is a pamphlet produced by the Doughnut Corporation of America just after World War II. Aimed at returning servicemen in search of business opportunities, it explains in detail how they can open their own shop using automatic doughnut machines and mixes produced by the DCA.

According to the introduction:

It is but natural that the great activity of the good old American donut in this World War II where fresh cooked donuts (made in automatic machines) followed our boys on all battle fronts, often close to the front lines… should prompt the Service Men to investigate the possibilities with donuts in civilian life.

The pamphlet opens with images of fighting men enjoying “a taste of home and the pleasant things they left behind”. (Click to enlarge.)

The Doughnut Corporation of America was founded during the inter-war years by Adolph Levitt, who owned a chain of bakeries. Seeing potential in the doughnut business he invested in the development of an automatic doughnut machine that could be sold to independent shops, and in 1925 he began offering the first standardized mixes for the machines with trade names such as Downyflake and Mayflower. (His was also the first company to use the spelling variation “donut”.)

The DCA soon monopolized American doughnut production, as this November 1940 article in TIME points out:

U. S. doughnut sales were estimated at some $78,000,0000 last year (up from $5,000,000 in 1920), and 80% of these doughnuts were made on Doughnut Corp. machines. More than 30% were also made from Doughnut Corp. mix. Its largest factory (in Ellicott City, Md.) operates now 20 hours a day, has some 2,000 employes. Doughnut Corp. is boss of the doughnut world.

The back of the pamphlet definitely gives the impression of a monolithic corporation:

The figures on doughnut production mentioned in the TIME article above may have come directly from the DCA, as they offer the same ones at the beginning of the pamphlet:

The bulk of the pamphlet is composed of questions and answers about doughnut retail sales – 75 questions in total, with an index! They range from the basic:

… to more complex issues such as location, operating costs, doughnut output, potential profits, and the running of the doughnut machines, making the pamphlet an interesting historical document. This page gives an idea of doughnut shop operating costs in 1944, with an estimated profit per dozen of 11 cents.

Below, the doughnut machine, which could make 480 doughnuts per hour. An early example of the shift to mechanized and processed food that began in earnest in the 1950s:

In addition to serving a practical purpose, the machines were marketing tools that generated visual interest in shop windows, and the use of national trade names  and corporate marketing materials presaged the rise of  fast food and the corporatization of eating.

One of the best things about the pamphlet is that many of the pages are decorated with photos of real doughnut shops and lunch counters. A fantastic look at period style and the design of eateries. Though I have my doubts about the pineapple doughnuts advertised in the second picture.