Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

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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. 6
HISTORY (cont’d) Accession 2407 ERNEST DICHTER PAPERS In Britain, Dichter encountered a society numbed by nearly three decades of Depression privation and war rationing, where American abundance still generated mixed reactions of awe and resentment. Traditional British society was hostile to Dichter at a number of levels. Britain’s long traditions of empiricism and analytical philosophy ensured that academics and scientists rejected Dichter’s qualitative methods and watereddown Freudianism out of hand. Its deeply-ingrained class system and notions of class solidarity that stifled anything that smacked of “putting on airs” or grabbing more than one’s share seemed to offer only barren ground for Dichter’s ideas of optimism and mobility. Dichter thought the British even more puritanical than the Americans, yet within a few years after Dichter opened his London office in 1958, Britain’s younger generation was developing its own brands of hedonism and fashion-sense and exporting them to the rest of the world. Even Dichter’s “balanced woman” was a step forward in the British case, as a 1965 study of women’s sexuality for Nova, a new women’s magazine, showed. In the end, however, Dichter’s most reliable British clients were vendors of cigarettes and chocolates. For whatever cultural reasons, Dichter continued to find a more receptive audience in the German-speaking Europe from which he had come. The branch offices in Zurich, his main European base (1968), and Frankfurt (1970) generated an increasing share of Dichter’s business, and in fact survived him. Dichter developed some of his strongest relationships with German and Swiss firms. By the 1960s, a resurgent feminism was but one of Dichter’s problems. The early success stories could not be repeated indefinitely. Dichter’s multi-volume reports could be little more than a post-mortem for the Edsel. Often as not, Dichter was called in as part of a usually unsuccessful drive to revive flagging sales of products that were losing their appeal or regional brands that eventually would succumb to competition from national chains. The academic study of consumer behavior was moving into business schools and becoming more quantitative and theoretical. Advertising thrived on novelty, and Freudianism was becoming old. Newer advertising agencies increasingly relied on humor and irony, and it became clear that if people could remember the style of your ad, your jingle, catchphrase or mascot for whatever reason, you didn’t have to punch their Freudian subconscious buttons. Beginning in the early 1960s, Dichter began responding to these challenges more by changing the scope of his work than by altering his own ideologies. He solicited more work from non-profits, governments and political candidates, shifted the emphasis from the product to the effectiveness of the packaging, and used his motivational techniques to 7
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Ernest Dichter Papers - Hagley Museum and Library

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