The astonishing thing about this book is that it was written in 1957.

It outlines the commencement of what has become an ongoing campaign to perfect be technique of selling to our unconscious. If recent world events are anything to go by, a campaign that has been successful.

While a significant portion of the book is devoted to anecdotes intended to surprise and amuse, there is more then enough there of chilling presentiment to make it a page turner.

Packard predicts the movement of subconscious marketing techniques into politics, and it is clear that he would be horrified by the facilities offered by our ubiquitous social media platforms today.

His primary target at the time appears to be the creation of built-in obsolescence and the waste of resources associated with unnecessary over-consumption.

His work presages that of modern students of framing, and is likely to have been an inspiration for academics such as ‘Don’t think of an elephant’s George Lakoff.

Well worth a read.

“Capitalism is dead – consumerism is king!”

Informed by the likes of pioneers like Edward Bernays and later to go on and influence the likes of J Douglas Edwards’ “Cashing Objections” and reflected and portrayed all too well in “Mad Men” in the 21st Century. Vance Packard’s book remains a hugely entertaining and informative read nearly 70 years later and has dated only in small, largely insignificant ways and proves to be hugely important today.

"We don’t sell lipstick, we buy customers.”

The United States came out of WWII stronger than ever, and overall the war proved to be one of the shrewdest business decisions it ever pulled off. By the time the 1950s came round the US had firmly established itself as the world’s strongest economy with the most wealthiest population, more people than ever were getting better educated and millions were actually in careers rather than jobs, with proper benefits and earning good money and better treatment than previous generations. Many could see that this new class of people were enjoying more disposable income and so they saw opportunities in helping them spend that extra cash, they would turn them into consumers.

“Leisure could solve the ‘greatest peril’ in our economy, the danger of production outrunning consumption.”

Enter the psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists etc. They would collude with the corporate world for often exorbitant fees to create new ideas of status, aspiration and wealth so that the American public would not just be consuming products, but ideas, dreams and myths.
These were routinely placed above the old, established ideas – in short greed took the place of need. They would achieve this by digging deep into the human mind, and after spending millions and many years of research they would use this knowledge to cynically exploit and play on our darkest fears, deepest insecurities and wildest dreams, creating a new world which sold us the illusion that all of our problems could be solved, all of our needs could be met and all of our dreams could come true if only be bought that next, new shiny thing they are selling us.

“The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat.”

Short, palatable chapters written in clear, accessible language which reveal many profound and shocking truths about the dark arts which were just beginning to come into their own. We learn about many of the techniques used, the likes of so called depth probing and subthreshold stimulation, such as conspicuous reserve through deliberate downgrading or the case of flashing ice cream during a movie at a cinema in New Jersey. We learn about the likes of Ernest Dichter who was charging $500 a day for his services and that was in the 1950s. We find out who Mrs Middle Majority is.

“When you are manipulating, where do you stop? Who is to fix the point at which manipulative attempts become socially undesirable?”

This book is absolutely fascinating in many places. Its far more detailed and developed than Bernays published works, which read more like cold bullet points, whereas this is more warm, refined and informative. We should keep in mind too the wider political and social landscape this book first came out in, the same decade where you could find adverts with doctors selling you the health benefits of smoking cigarettes, the cold war was in full swing, McCarthyism scaring the nation into a dark, paranoid state as the Americans fully embraced the atomic age. This is essential reading, so do yourself a favour and read it.

This 1957 book is about the growing field of manipulating people from buying products to politicians.

It was no doubt referenced in creating the show Mad Men, and is still frighteningly applicable today. I've always wondered why marketing and advertising techniques weren't taught in high school to make people aware of the subtle, or not so subtle, ways of separating people from their money or appealing to tribal groupthink.

Sure, changing a packaging color because it has positive connotations seems perfectly acceptable. What about trying to find a psychological "in" to try and get mothers to feel guilty about not giving their pre-teen daughters permanent waves becUse they will be unattractive and rejected by the group without them.

Persuasion usually falls on fear, insecurity, conforming which rolls up into status. In 1957 they talk identify how people do not think rationally and logically about what they need and therefore do not make rationale decisions. It's also raised the issues of supplanting democracy/citizenship with consumerism. Yet, here we are sixty years later and there has literally been no improvement the understanding or the effete of this change. GWB in his presidency acknowledged the US has to change from a consumer to an ownership society. This aside without a whimper, but that's where the country is going - a great divide is being erected without any democractic forum to discuss better solutions.

In the book it touches on the idea that in the year 2000 there would be biocontrol of people via chip implants. There was talk about chip implants but it never came to fruition. What did happen, however, was that technology advanced from the more public-minded television stations to where we are now: the targeted and narrow marketing of ideas that are filtered via the internet and social media. The centralization the internet has brought has created a further alienation used by marketing and politicians to keep their targets fed on only their version of reality.

“Consider what the psychologist has to say about the symbolism of soup,” he said. “Besides being a good food, stimulating to the appetite and easily assimilated into the blood stream, soup is unconsciously associated with man’s deepest need for nourishment and reassurance. It takes us back to our earliest sensations of warmth, protection, and feeding. Its deepest roots may lie in prenatal sensations of being surrounded by the amniotic fluid in our mother’s womb.”

Gloriously outdated yet poignantly prescient and relevant. A wonderful insight into the inner workings of the mind and how far marketers will go to influence decisions.

This was the book that tutors told me was vital during my media degree and no doubt fifteen years later it is still regarded as high on the list of 'must reads'.

The epilogue, written in the eighties is possibly more outdated than the rest of the book. A great shame that Packard died in the early nineties and wasn't around to witness the rise of the internet, big data and the greatest loss of personal privacy to the 'hidden persuaders' ever seen. Or indeed, not seen.

I read this in college.
It still is too relevant.
It’s an indictment of the gullibility of the American average citizen susceptibility to motivational manipulation.
In discussion of motivation in a mass setting, you can easily see the roots of the Trump Campaign and the Nuremberg Rallies under the Nazi Party domination.

I really enjoyed this book -- very insightful even if almost 50 years old.

fragments about a fave

The New York Times
December 30th 2007

The books a child sneaks off his parents’ bookshelves and surreptitiously reads ought to be sex books. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Memoirs of Hecate County” scandalized and educated earlier generations.

The volume I made off with was a 75-cent paperback of “The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard. It did scandalize me, completely. But it did so by exposing the secret world of advertising and brands.

Packard had tried to warn Americans of a new mutation in advertising. Powerful admen were working to tap the irrational in the consumer mind, using the applied psychology and sociology supported by the government during World War II.

As more goods came to supermarket shelves, advertisers decided they were no longer selling just products, but malleable brand “personalities.”

Decades later, I knew the results. Of course Coke was the red wholesomeness of tradition and majority taste, and Pepsi was the younger, blue, less popular choice of a rebellious new generation!

My 14-year-old self was sure of it.

Packard had lived on the cusp of two eras, and what fascinated me as a teenage reader was how close in time he had been to the invention of brands that seemed as solid and permanent to me as trees and stones.

Marlboro, the essence of macho, had first been a women’s cigarette, “lipstick red and ivory tipped.” Advertisers managed to push it into a male market while holding on to its previous customers through ad campaigns of “rugged, virile-looking men” (like the famous cowboy) whom, studies proved, women liked too.

Packard traced how products like gasoline and detergent, so standardized and reliable in the 1950s, needed to develop “personalities” to survive. I, for one, knew I was a Mobil guy long before I ever got my learner’s permit, though I had no idea why.

The bête noire of “The Hidden Persuaders” was “motivational research.”

Rather than focusing on products, this “depth” research dug into the psychological weaknesses and needs of consumers. Packard wanted brands to certify purity or quality, to make an old-fashioned fact-based appeal to citizens who had price and effectiveness in mind.

Scientists of motivation, on the other hand, were trying to puzzle out the reasons for impulsive and even self-destructive purchasing, then tailor images and packaging accordingly.

As the 2008 primaries approach, it’s disturbing to see how the novelties Packard deplored have become accepted fundamentals. For 1956, professional advertisers were hired to “swing crucial voters” in “the undecided or listless mass,” trolling for weaknesses in candidates’ images. The “switch voter,” an advertising expert explained after much study, is not a thoughtful “independent” but someone who “switches for some snotty little reason such as not liking the candidate’s wife.”

Whatever its flaws, I’ll keep recommending “The Hidden Persuaders.” For me, it’s the original inoculation against manipulation, and every once in a while —perhaps especially in this political season —one needs to go back for a booster.

Years before Naomi Klein wrote her No Logo, Vance Packard wrote of the way in which marketers were employing the findings of psychology in order to market more aggressively to consumers. For most contemporary readers, this is probably an instance of a conspiracy theory that is no longer a theory nor a secret.

Acquired Aug 28, 2006
P.T. Campbell Bookseller, London, Ontario

A product of its times, mid 1950's, so racist and sexist. Filled with pseudoscientifc pop psychology claptrap - people like soup because they remember amniotic fluid in the womb - that is not addressed by the author until the third last chapter instead of debunking at the moment of writing. Very few citations for sources - an unnamed executive at a major company said ... Still, worth a read to get your skeptical radar working. See also "How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff.

A classic when it comes to motivational research and manipulation. A must-read for all who's interested in the history of advertising.

As a true victim of consumerism, this book resonated with me.

Some quotes that i liked:

"We can sell these people refrigerators. They may not have room for them, and they will put them on the front porch. They will buy a big automobile and all the luxuries, but they never move up the scale."

"What are the implications of all this persuasion in terms of our existing morality? What does it mean for the national morality to have so many powerfully influential people taking a manipulative attitude toward our society? Some of these persuaders, in their
energetic endeavors to sway our actions, seem to fall unwittingly into the attitude that man exists to be manipulated."