The century of self
Meet K. K lives in a modern house with a lot of windows that always have bright rays of sunshine shining in. She wears impeccably white satin clothes that are constantly blowing in the wind because all her windows are open. K starts every morning by gently rubbing some Dove moisturizing lotion on her face while smiling. She listens to upbeat music that makes her feel like she can take on the world. K exudes confidence. Every morning as she puts the last dab of moisturizer on her face, a conventionally attractive man walks out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist and gives her an endearing kiss on the cheek. She wraps up her routine by blowing a kiss in the mirror and winking at herself.
Not too long ago, call it 100 years, we believed humans were mostly rationale creatures who made economic decisions based on reason and practicality. Products were therefore marketed by explaining their features or comparing them to other products to show how they are superior. See this old car commercial below as an example.
That method is very different from the marketing we experience today. How did we get from the old car commercial example above, to the made up commercial I described in the opening of this post? Though I made up the Dove commercial, it should sound pretty familiar to you. Beauty product commercials are filled with messaging meant to appeal to our desire for love and self-confidence, and fear that we aren’t good enough. Not to mention all the other subtle factors meant to make us associate positively with their products like bright sunshine, clean white clothes, and upbeat music. We’ve learned that the best way to sell anything is to connect it deeply to a persons values, fears, and desires.
The story of this transformation in the way we market products is quite fascinating, and has some bigger implications than just new commercial formats. I learned a lot of what I’ll detail below from a documentary called The Century of Self, which is worth checking out if you’ve got a few hours.
We can trace the beginning of this cultural shift to a well known psychologist named Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that individuals are driven by irrational motives and are often at the mercy of their subconscious fears and desires. Because of this belief, Freud felt that the masses could not be trusted to control themselves, and posed a threat to society unless they were controlled.
Freud had a nephew named Edward Bernays who shared his uncles beliefs. Bernays had witnessed the powerful effect of propaganda on wartime efforts and posited that if its possible to manipulate masses during wartime, it should be possible to do the same in peace time. In doing so, he became the father of public relations.
During Bernays career, he worked with many of America’s largest companies to advise them how to market to consumers. One of his well-known success stories was when he was able to get American women to smoke, which had previously been a major taboo. Bernays focused his efforts on targeting peoples emotions instead of their logic. Bernays began to associate cigarettes with gender equality, calling them “torches of freedom”. He also used tactics like paying women to smoke in public at large gatherings like parades. Before long, a large population of women in America were smoking.
There is another famous story about Bernays that I find quite wild. In the early 1950s, the Guatemalan government attempted to implement farming legislation that included expropriating unused land from an American company called United Fruit (now known as Chiquita, your friendly banana company) and redistributing it to the countries poor citizens who did not own land. Of course, United Fruit wasn’t happy about these potential reforms, so they called Edward Bernays.
Bernays strategy was to create a PR campaign to influence public opinion against the Guatemalan government and its potential new laws. He used various techniques to frame the situation as a threat to American interests and democracy. For example, Bernays took advantage of the “red scare” and employed fear tactics and propaganda to portray the Guatemalan government as a communist regime.
Using his media connections, Bernays also spread propaganda and fake coverage that aligned with United Fruits interests. He even went as far as to organize a trip for American journalists to come to Guatemala. During this trip, he orchestrated the journalists experience to present a very negative image of the government, which he hoped they’d take back to America, and write about. They did.
This public relations and manipulation campaign was a contributing factor in the perception that the Guatemalan government was a threat to American interests. As a result, in 1954, the US government supported a coup against Guatemala’s president, which toppled the democratically elected government and was replaced with a U.S. backed leader.
Bernays called the type of work he did in Guatemala the “engineering of consent”.
Bernays was not just involved in business and public relations for marketings sake. At a deeper level, he felt it was his and a small elites duty to manage the masses in order to create a stable society. Again, his bias towards this theory goes back to the influence of his uncle, who believed that the masses are irrational and dangerous if not controlled.
Bernays did not believe that democracy was an ideal way to structure a government given the masses irrationality. His solution for control of the population was to satiate peoples desires through a system of meeting needs with products, which he felt would make people subdued, less aggressive, and less of a risk to a government. This shift would move participants in the democracy from active contributors, to simply passive consumers. Considering the amount of time we spend drowning ourselves in entertainment, shopping, and a general focus on our “self-made” identities and personal “brands”, I would say Bernays was fairly successful.
Bernays techniques of social engineering and targeting the core of consumers irrational wants and desires became deeply influential for corporate America. New methods to better understand consumers emerged such as focus groups. Focus groups were created as a form of group psychoanalysis that allowed business to figure out the fears and desires of their potential customers. Ernest Dichter was the creator of these groups, and one of his notable successes was when he worked with a company selling instant cake mix whose sales were very low. Through the use of focus groups, Dichter detected a sense of guilt from housewives who felt that making a cake from a box was lazy. His solution was to have the women add their own eggs to the cake mix. Suddenly, the women felt more involved in the process of making of the cake, and sales of the product rose sharply.
Psychoanalysts like Dichter trained businesses to recognize and exploit people’s fears and desires. By the 1950’s, these ideas were widespread in business and politics. Again, the belief was that by regulating peoples irrational desires and fears, our societies would be better. Another common belief was that by aligning products with peoples personalities in a complimentary way, we would be more emotionally stable and live happier lives.
All of this new research and assumptions about human psychology tempted business and government agencies to dabble in experiments to manipulate the human mind. The CIA for example got involved and funded experiments to see if they could effectively “brainwash” a person by removing old memories, and then reshaping a new person in alignment with their interests. They did not have success with these experiments, and learned that humans were more complex than they thought.
Perhaps as a result of all these failed attempts at influencing human behaviour, in the 1960’s, the psychoanalysts power and influence began to shrink. Books started being written, and prominent psychologists called out the psychoanalysts techniques as ways to help the elite gain power and money by exploiting and controlling the masses based on their hidden agendas.
So the pendulum begun to swing. Psychoanalysts were accused of trying to build a society that added power and wealth to the elite, while they controlled and manipulated the masses. A psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Reich who had opposite beliefs from the Freud family came to prominence. Reich believed that people were inherently good, but societies wanted to repress and control them, and make them evil and dangerous.
As this new way of thinking expanded, the masses started to fight back against the perceived control that their societies placed on them. People fought against the concept that they were simply a part of the crowd, and wanted to express their individuality. Hippies were a good example of a group of people in America that started as a rebellion against the government and big corporations, and wanted to instead focus on self expression. But as the 1900’s drew to a close, businesses had become so good at figuring out how to help people become what they wanted to be, that these individuals were almost completely dependant on businesses to shape their identities. Ironic.
The time period around the 1960’s and into the 70’s is what I would call the official outworking of the “century of self”, which is a period that we are still in now. This period represents a hyper focus on self-expression, and individualism. The irony we see from the hippies, and with us today is we assume that this desire has come purely from within us, but I doubt that is true. As I talked about in my post You Are What You Eat, it is pretty arrogant of us to assume we haven’t been influenced by culture, marketing, and the countless other influences that seek to shape us.
Are we sure that the clothes we wear, the decorations in our homes, the cars we drive, and the products we subscribe to are a result of a completely personal decision without any subtle prodding? Or is it possible that many of the goods and services we consume, and our supposed needs and desires have been shaped by an industry that has become experts at appealing to us?
As businesses got better and better at understanding their customers, the idea of segmenting consumers gained popularity. Businesses needed to learn the different personalities and personas of their customers, and needed to provide products that helped the people express these traits. Rather than simply divide consumers into demographic groupings, we can further divide them into different values and lifestyles. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs became a major part of this process, as businesses tried to align product marketing with the top of the pyramid, self-actualization. Political parties used these lessons as well, and segmented their voters into groups in order to best target each of them.
As the success of segmentation spread, political parties went all in on this approach. Candidates would present numerous agenda’s, and the voter would choose based on their preferences. Politics became hyper focused on incredibly granular opinion polls and analysis of political desires, with the parties trying to match their platforms with the needs of these voters. This might sound like a good thing, but as businesses had learned and capitalized on, our needs and desires change often. By catering to voters whims and unconscious desires, political parties were losing direction and veering off course from their core values. An example was with the labour party in Britain, where the party tried to listen to voters who did not seem to value more railways. So the labour party stopped building train tracks. However, this plan backfired in the long run as voters in the future were angry that the party didn’t invest more in infrastructure for rail transport. The lesson here is what worked for business did not work for politics. Business happens to be in the business of responding to peoples short term and changing desires. Politics, it seems, is not.
I have a few takeaways from all of this.
A New Economy
The cultural shifts described above transformed society. What was once a finite economy based solely on providing for the unchanging needs of the masses, has become an economy that is not only able to satisfy a forever changing and infinite number of individual desires, but is able to create and manage desires as well.
Most of what I described above took place before the internet existed, or at least before most of us had access. In the age of the internet and social media, we now live in an almost constant state of surveillance. We are in a never-ending focus group. Companies and political parties have the ability to gather and analyze staggering amounts of data on us. Data that taken separately would mean very little, but when combined and aggregated, informs a lot about ourselves.
Political sideshows
The problem with focusing on peoples wants/desires, is people are contradictory and changing. Politics seems like it is trying to be like businesses still, attempting to create and fulfill an infinite number of desires. The result is a whole bunch of short term decision making that wins the hearts of voters enough to get elected, but doesn’t have a long term positive impact on our countries. In many cases, the decisions have a negative long term impact.
We’re also seeing elections becoming more and more like circus acts, with big personalities duking it out. How I long for the days when we just had a sad sack Prime Minister who’d sit in their office quietly each day doing paperwork and would only be in the news if we went to war. I think politicians should be some of the most boring people on the planet. Today, voters align themselves to personalities, not policy. And the policies most of us focus on are culture war-esque, ie – policies that connect to our deepest fears and desires, rather than the drab and boring issues like budgets or infrastructure.
Final Thoughts
We were bound to figure out that humans are not purely rational creatures who should be sold goods by explaining their features and practicality. I’m surprised it took as long as it did honestly. But now that we’ve figured it out, there is no going back.
The bigger implication of this shift in marketing styles that I referenced early in the post is that we have allowed ourselves to become extremely consumeristic. It’s not our fault that marketing efforts became a lot more sophisticated and companies understand us enough to appeal to our desires and fears. It is our responsibility to respond appropriately and not reduce ourselves to simply trying to satisfy our conscious and unconscious desires at all times. I think there is a bit more to humanity than that.