Vance Packard Hidden Persuaders Quotes

You can probably make them do anything for you: Sell people things they don’t need; make women who don’t know you fall in love with you.

It is dangerous to asume that people can be trusted to behave in a rational way (...) What the probers are looking for, of course, are the "whys" of our behavior, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favor.

AS STRATEGY SESSIONS BEGAN IN HAWTHORNE, THE Handlers made a brilliant tactical move. They commissioned a toy study from Ernest Dichter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The study cost a staggering $12,000 and took six months to complete, but when it was finished the charge seemed low. Dichter had masterminded a cunning campaign to peddle Barbie. Dichter was already a legend when the Handlers approached him. Quoted on nearly every page of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller in 1957, Dichter was hailed as a marketing Einstein—an evil Einstein, but an Einstein nonetheless. He pioneered what he called "motivational research," advertising's newest, hippest, and, in Packard's view, scariest trend—the manipulation of deep-seated psychological cravings to sell merchandise.

Barbie's large breasts make sense as a function of her time—postwar America. Breasts are emblematic of the home; they produce milk and provide security and comfort. Some of the strangest market research in Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders dealt with what milk meant to soldiers in World War II.

The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard.

The journal openly ridiculed writers who failed to use "scientific" formats for their ideas when offering heretical points of view on mass communication issues. Two examples of this can be found in Avery Leiserson's scathing review of George Seldes' The People Don't Know and Lloyd Barenblatt's commentary on Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders. Both Seldes and Packard argued that the mass media in the United States presented a monolithic, ideologically charged version of "reality" that had succeeded in shaping popular consciousness to a much greater degree than was generally recognized; POQ presented both authors to its readers as irresponsible crackpots.

One of the interesting variations, under the ways to fulfil ‘wish for attention’ through car ownership, is what the investigators call ‘conspicuous reserve’. Those people want other people to know their status but at the same time want to express it modestly. Some may engage in deliberate downgrading. This is ‘a frequent technique of people who are secure in their high social position. They show their superiority by displaying indifference to status - by purposely buying less expensive cars than they might be expected. They love beat-up station wagons and old cars.