Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

HISTORY (cont’d)
Accession 2407
ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS
A more comprehensive attack was launched by Vance Packard in his 1957 book The
Hidden Persuaders, who arraigned Dichter as “the most famed” practitioner of
techniques that promoted mass consumption and self-indulgence and manipulated
consumers into buying things they never wanted or needed. Ironically, Packard’s attack
served as the perfect endorsement for potential clients, increasing Dichter’s business and
his stature. Dichter himself responded with a presentation of his own views in Strategy of
Desire in 1960. Whatever one thinks of Dichter’s own beliefs, his report interviews
show his consumer subjects to be critical and skeptical, often brutally so, and capable of
distinguishing what worked for them from advertising hype.
The attack by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique in 1963 was less easily
deflected. Dichter’s quasi-Freudian psychology, adherence to the notion of separate
spheres, and personal view of women as male help-meets could not be reconciled with
any version of feminism. Dichter had long divided female consumers into three classes.
The “career woman,” even if lacking an actual career, might dream of one and felt bored
and frustrated by housework. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the “pure housewife”
reveled in traditional domestic duties. As a result, neither was likely to be a receptive
consumer of household goods, the first being indifferent and the second committed to the
doctrine of “do it yourself.” Dichter favored (or perhaps created) the happy medium of
the “balanced woman,” who enjoyed housekeeping, yet engaged in or at least thought
about some activities outside the domestic circle. The “balanced woman” was the perfect
mark for advertisers, because they could entice her to try some supposedly labor-saving
product that would allegedly increase her free time, while at the same time playing on her
guilt at not being a more dedicated homemaker and her desire to meld domesticity and
creativity. So in a famous study for General Mills, Dichter advised them to remove the
powdered eggs and milk from Bisquick, a biscuit or cake mix which needed only water,
on the grounds that it eliminated the last bit of creativity in cooking. The “balanced
woman” could be won over by being made an active (but not too active) participant
through adding the real eggs and milk herself.
On the crest of his American successes, Dichter took his approach back to Europe.
Here he encountered varying blends of resistance and acceptance depending upon a given
country’s general stance on the larger issues of “Americanization.” Where cultural
resistance was highest, in Paris (1958) and Rome (1959), Dichter’s branch offices were
small and short-lived, although he continued to do some work for French clients out of
New York.
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