George Parker: Relax, We Are in Control, Your Brain is Turning to Mush!

In The Ubiquitous Persuaders, I describe how, in his 1957 classic, The Hidden Persuaders, Vince Packard talks about “Motivational Research” and how “the large-scale efforts being made by advertisers, often with impressive success to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry.” To the reader, this was pretty scary. Particularly when you consider the fifties were rife with rumors of the Red Menace and Manchurian Candidate mind manipulation. As this was in the aftermath of the Korean War and at the time of the McCarthy Congressional hearings, the media was more than happy to ride this wave of paranoia.

They also loved a central character in the book, Dr. Ernst Dichter, an archetypical European “Shrink” with tweedy suits and jelly jar bottom spectacles. He was the founder of “The Institute of Motivational Research” where he and his staff, working out of a Gothic pile overlooking the Hudson River, studied such esoteric subjects as the effects of TV cartoons on the toilet habits of children and why women buy different kinds of ketchup during their menstrual cycles. He insisted on always being referred to by all and sundry as “Dr.”, even though there is doubt he ever received a Bachelors degree, let alone a Doctorate. According to Dichter, humans were an immature bunch with lots of irrational insecurities and insatiable erotic desires. He insisted cigarette ads aimed at women should show them holding the product “erect,” as this was more penis like. He also suggested to Mattel on the launch of “Barbie,” they should make her tits bigger, his only surviving success.

Dichter is long gone, But, Motivational Research never went away. Over the fifty years that have passed since it was featured so scarily in Packard’s book, it’s been constantly reinvented in a less threatening guise. We now have a proliferation of psycho/marketing/branding companies claiming, once again to be able to delve into the inner depths of the consumer’s mind and deliver triggers that reduce the waste of ineffective advertising and create messages that bring on an insatiable desire for products.

Today, much of it is data driven, relying on masses of information that through the miracle of digital technology allow its practitioners to forecast what advertising messages will influence a single welfare mother of three, living in a trailer park in Georgia, to buy a certain brand of cornflakes. Often referred to as Psychometrics, this new interpretation of MR relies on such awe inspiring and exciting sounding techniques as “factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and data clustering.” Very impressive, but nevertheless, still primarily bullshit.

That’s why I was amused to read in a recent New York Times piece about a Yale undergraduate using magnetic resonance imaging to “study brain waves and determine how people respond to advertising.” Yes you ad wankers, this 20 year old undergraduate has all the answers. Apparently, Emily Yudofsky became curious about the potential of “neuromarketing” (nom du jour for bullshit) in high school, when she worked in a laboratory that did research on the consumer response to the Coke V Pepsi campaign. She has now formed a neuromarketing company that will specialize in research on public service advertising, hoping to develop anti-smoking or don’t-drink-and-drive campaigns.

Well that’s it, a 20 year old still in school has formed a company to show us what we’re doing wrong. She’ll do well. We’re fucked… Time for a drink!

George Parker is a guest columnist for psfk.com. He the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, which is without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. He is the author of MadScam and his new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, which is currently setting the ether ablaze (and which you can order now on Amazon). He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.