Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

HISTORY (cont’d)
Accession 2407
ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS
and possessions. He also saw how material abundance complicated the age-old issue of
status markers, allowing for all sorts of associations and “personal statements” between
the old dichotomy of excess for the rich few and meagerness for everyone else. Hence,
for Dichter, consumption, properly channeled, became a form of therapy and selfrealization.
Goods chosen to meet one’s inner needs and social responsibilities
represented an advance over items chosen simply as external status markers to assert
one’s superiority. Mass communication, again properly channeled and explained, became
the structural framework of democratic society. Products designed and sold in line with
people’s deepest, albeit irrational, internal needs would constitute realistic and realizable
small steps towards a better life, if not the Good Life. Such steps, Dichter believed,
would allay the kind of mass public anxieties that had been exploited by Hitler and other
totalitarians of left and right.
At the same time, Dichter seems to have had a sense of mission to bring a more open,
Continental sexuality to repressed, puritanical America and to make American society
more open to immigrants and outsiders. In this, he was largely riding on underlying
tectonic shifts that had been going on for years and that had accelerated during the social
disruptions of World War II. On the other hand, he seems to have believed that American
politics, and for that matter advertising, had gone too far in the direction of the real
equality of the sexes. Dichter was a believer in gender complementarity, not equality,
which implied the existence of subconscious gendered consumer preferences that
advertisers ignored at their peril. In an early study he expatiated on “the gender of rice,”
rice being by culture, if not by nature, “feminine,” while potatoes, say, were perceived as
“masculine.” A corollary was that advertisers must avoid sexual ambiguity or confusion
in their ads, pitching a “masculine” product in a “feminine” way or vice versa, and
especially avoiding the suggestion that a product was, in today’s parlance, “too gay,” an
issue that was, in contrast to the frankness about bodily functions, usually approached
obliquely in the 1950s and 60s.
Even at his peak, Dichter had opponents. Some maintained that his work was
insufficiently quantitative and was therefore “unscientific,” and in fact, Dichter seems to
have been forced to include more quantitative analysis later on simply to keep up with
disciplinary trends. Others thought Dichter was little more that a gifted advertising
copywriter who simply wrapped his creative insights in psychological garb, or a pitchman
who could appeal over the heads of experts to bosses who found his presentation of
simple truisms psychologically profound.
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