George Will, Vance Packard and the Creation of Needs

Vance Packard was not the only one concerned with the effects of motivational research applied to advertising back in the 1950’s.  Even Public Relations people were asking themselves probing questions.  Nicholas Samstag in The Engineering of Consent wrote, “It may be said that to take advantage of a man’s credulity, to exploit his misapprehensions, to capitalize on his ignorance is morally reprehensible—and this may well be the case . . . .  I do not know.”

W. Howard Chase, president of the Public Relations Society of America in 1956 said, “The very presumptuousness of molding or affecting the human mind through the techniques we use has created a deep sense of uneasiness in our minds.”

I could add another hundred such quotes from ad men and scholars of the fifties to these, but I would have to conclude the list by saying that in the end all this concern made little difference in the practices of ad agencies and businesses.  Nor did they evoke much concern in the minds of the American public.  To be sure, battles were fought and won concerning ads that manipulate children to buy “harmful” products like sugar-coated cereals, but for the most part, the American people surrendered to the media’s manipulation like sheep. Psychological manipulation of consumers won.  Business won.

In 1986, when Vance Packard died, the conservative pundit George Will, in a column written shortly after  Packard’s death, did a little dance on the grave of Packard.  After accurately describing Packard’s work as a warning to the American people about its “deepening submission to a subtle tyranny of selling” that turns “wants into synthetic needs,” Will dismisses these warnings as groundless fears, just another failed liberal cause. He offers as proof of his argument that Americans “are not plastic to the touch of the persuaders” the story of the failure of Ford Motor Company to entice Americans to buy the Edsel though Ford had spent huge sums of money advertising it. 

But that really proves nothing about Packard’s thesis.  Packard would never argue that Americans surrendered their entire mind to ad manipulation, and he would probably have said—if could respond from the grave—that the need for big powerful automobiles was a need created by advertising—as it surely was.  The fact that the design of the Edsel was dramatically inferior to the design of three or four GM cars in another thing entirely.

Will acknowledges a few paragraphs later that “most advertising aims less to increase aggregate demand for a category of goods or services than to increase a brand’s market share.” GM did a better job of increasing its brand’s market share than Ford did, but that does not take away from the power of advertising to manipulate.

Will also argues that advertising does not usually seek to create the need for a new class of products and he is probably right about that.  Most of the ads we saw during the Super Bowl were “product differentiation” ads, that is, ads that sought to show why we ought to buy this car or breakfast food rather than another.  But if you doubt the fact that ads also create the needs for new products, ask yourself what kind of cell phone you had ten years ago or three years ago.  We are constantly confronted with new products in ways so seductive that we just have to go out and buy them.

So George Will can do his little dance and sing “I was right and you were wrong” to a deceased Vance Packard because, in the end, business won—in part—because clever marketers created a nation of consumers.

But if you think we were made for something more profound and believe that messing with the psyches of people to get them to buy stuff is a nefarious business, then you might, like me, bemoan the fact that virtually every aspect of our lives in now dominated by the “business mind” which automatically carries with it the menace of manipulative advertising.