Vance Packard Quotes

Leadership appears to be the art of getting others to want to do something you are convinced should be done.

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.

The bulk of the advertising directed at children today has an immediate goal. “It’s not just getting kids to whine,” one marketer explained in Selling to Kids, “it’s giving them a specific reason to ask for the product.” Years ago sociologist Vance Packard described children as “surrogate salesmen” who had to persuade other people, usually their parents, to buy what they wanted. Marketers now use different terms to explain the intended response to their ads—such as “leverage,” “the nudge factor,” “pester power.” The aim of most children’s advertising is straightforward: Get kids to nag their parents and nag them well.

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.

And the hot new things that were just starting out—Facebook and Twitter—certainly did not look like their predecessors—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems—that made physical products and employed tens of thousands of people in the process. In the years that followed, the goal went from taking huge risks to create new industries and grand new ideas, to chasing easier money by entertaining consumers and pumping out simple apps and advertisements. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.” Silicon Valley began to look an awful lot like Hollywood. Meanwhile, the consumers it served had turned inward, obsessed with their virtual lives.

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.