• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Not according to Greif’s essay, which concluded with these words: “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.”

Because I happened to be writing a book about advertising, and since part of that book was to include a section on strategic planning and focus groups, and since I was about to take a trip to Chicago to spend a day at Leo Burnett Worldwide with members of one of the largest and most sophisticated strategic planning and research divisions in the world, I thought it might be a good idea to first take a look at The Hidden Persuaders.

My copy arrived the day before my flight. The best trips are often the ones in which you set out with one itinerary and end up in places you’d never imagined. The minute I began reading Mark Crispin Miller’s introduction to the new edition of The Hidden Persuaders, I realized my visit to Leo Burnett, which I had originally planned to help provide a basic overview of a day in the life of strategic planners, wasn’t going to be as straightforward as I’d imagined.

“A nation built for shopping cannot possibly endure as a democracy,” Miller wrote. And, “For our toxic air and water, our tasteless crops and doubtful meats, our ever-rising cancer rates, the ‘obesity epidemic’ striking down our children, the poisoned imports sent to us from China and, of course, for global warming, we can now belatedly thank Earnest Elmo Calkins, Rosser Reeves, David Ogilvy and all the other geniuses of advertising, and especially, the corporations that retained them.”

Well, now. I’d already felt conflicted enough about my tour of duty in advertising, and now I was realizing that everything in the world that I’d always worried about and railed against was actually my fault. Right down to the doubtful meats.

My initial instinct was to dismiss Greif and Packard and Miller.

Surely I’d never witnessed anyone from Packard’s “hidden world of motivational research” propose the employment of proprietary psychological techniques to “probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers.” I hadn’t seen any “powerful mutations” in the business. Sure, when immersed in an assignment, we would often rely on focus groups and research, and mine our everyday lives for some sort of clue or insight that might form the basis of a creative idea. But it never felt as formal or insidious as Greif, Packard, and now Miller contended. We were usually overworked and shooting from the hip, doing the best we could with limited resources, and often retrofitting our supposed research findings to fit a creative idea, not meeting with manipulators.

Plus, some of the language Packard used to make his case, even fifty years later, seemed intentionally alarmist and hell-bent on doing some persuading of its own, via shock and fear. He repeatedly called the researchers “probers” who were “probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness, and so on.” Today language like this comes off as more bizarre and kind of funny than shocking, but obviously in 1957, in the middle of the Cold War, it resonated. So yeah, my first inclination was to dismiss him, just as Ogilvy and the powers that be in advertising had dismissed Packard a half century ago.

But the book was fascinating. Reading it spurred me to question not just a fifty-year-old marketing practice but its lasting effects, and the way in which its descendants shape our lives today. Did advertising driven by motivational research turn America into a society grounded in consumerism (in which personal happiness is equated with the purchase and consumption of material possessions)? Are advertisers and researchers appealing to our basest, often most destructive behaviors and desires, or are they creating them?

And even if the answers to all of the