Edward Bernays, who we heard from at the beginning, is generally regarded as the inventor of PR, the first form of mass-market advertising. After helping Woodrow Wilson lead the American public into the First World War – under the banner not of restoring the old empires, but of bringing democracy to Europe – Bernays realized that ‘if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace’. But thanks to the German war effort, propaganda had acquired a bad name, so Bernays coined the term ‘public relations’ and set up the first advertising agency just off Broadway.
As a consequence of the war, the United States had become a heavily industrialized society with millions of people living in cities, and Bernays wanted to influence the way these masses thought and felt. After reading a book written by his uncle – A General Introduction to outside in marketing by Freud – Bernays realized that he could make money for his clients by manipulating the public’s unconscious. Bernays’s insight was that behaviour is not driven by information; instead, it’s all about repressed desires and animal instincts. He realized that if he could link products to desires and emotions, he could influence what people bought. He was thus the first person to create an emotional connection between consumer and product – something that is still in use today. Up until then, products were sold purely on the basis of the market’s needs, but the corporations – which controlled the manufacturing of goods, and which were represented by Bernays – knew that they had to alter this state of affairs in order to sell as fast as they could produce. Bernays’s theories helped change the basis of the public’s buying habits from needs to desires: ‘Man’s desires must overshadow his needs’, as Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers wrote in 1927. The corporations also needed the public to be conditioned into wanting new products before the old ones had been fully consumed. This, then, was the birth of planned obsolescence. Fast forward ninety years and this is one of Apple’s core philosophies. Through such innovations as product placement in Hollywood movies and the selling of cars as symbols of male sexuality, Bernays succeeded in convincing the American public to buy products not because they needed them but in order to express their inner selves. By the late 1920s Americans had shifted from being citizens to being consumers: what really mattered now was buying stuff. As governments realized to their delight, it was consumerism that drove life, that kept the public happy. Provided the people were busy living, working and buying, those in charge could be left alone to pursue other interests. It was the philosopher, sociologist and political theorist Herbert Marcuse who spotted that consumerism had become a form of social control. ‘The people recognize themselves in their commodities’, he wrote in 1964. ‘They find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.’ The students that Marcuse taught – at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis University and the University of California, San Diego – picked up on this way of thinking, and soon the protest movement was born, railing against the control of corporate America. Its members quickly understood that the most effective form of protest was to regain control of their own minds and free themselves from state and corporate hegemony. The way forward was for the public to talk about the things that the state wanted repressed. This movement led to the creation of the cult of the self. The Unbrandable reference point here is that these new thinkers were still consumers, but what they wanted were products and brands that expressed their individuality – that would make them stand out as different in a conformist society and marketplace. The corporations were caught napping, and it took them a decade or so to catch up, to tap into this new demographic. Enter the focus group, which, by the 1980s, was how the corporations discovered not only how their brands were perceived but also what they should be producing. The generation that once rebelled against consumerism was now fully embedded in it. The history of mass-marketing appears to be cyclical in nature, a pendulum swinging back and forth. There will always be someone stood opposite, reacting against the current position, but eventually that person’s counter-position will become the norm – the way stuff is then sold. Once this is understood, we can look at where the market is right now and then swing across to the opposite, the antithesis. This is the starting point for the Unbrandable solution.
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