Insidious - The story of how a man you have never heard of, designed your life
April 07, 2016
Excerpt
............... Bernays studied a copy of 'General Introduction to Psychoanalysis' by his uncle Sigmund Freud. In this book Bernays discovered that in people’s minds there were irrational forces driving them and their behavior.
People were primarily driven towards pleasure and away from pain, even if what they were doing were completely irrational. They would respond more readily to what they wanted rather than what was sensible.
Bernays began working on how he could use these irrational driving forces. If he could harness them in individuals then he might also be able to direct groups in the same way.
In fact he recognized that crowds have their own rationale, and that people who normally remain rational can get caught up in the frenzy of a crowd. There is an infectious element that grows as the crowd grows.
It occurred to him that if you could link a product to one of these deeply-held desires, you could motivate the individual to buy that product and thereby satisfy their own unconscious desires.
Bernays also realized that the dynamic of crowds meant that once a critical mass was achieved, people not associated with these crowds would be influenced by the publicity surrounding the crowd and would also join in.
Of course we now know this as safety in numbers. If everybody is doing this then it must be OK. It's the very basis of mass hysteria in stock markets and politics. Very few people feel comfortable being on the outside and our unconscious drives us towards comfort.
There is a great story about how Bernays was approached by the head of a large American tobacco company. They wanted to build their market, but they had a problem. In those days there was a social taboo about women smoking, and this was effectively cutting their market in half. They asked if Bernays could help. He agreed to see what he could do.
He approached A A Brill, one of the leading psychoanalysts of the day and asked him to find out what cigarettes meant to women.
Brill conducted extensive research into this subject and eventually reported back that because only men were allowed to smoke, women thought of cigarettes as a penis and a symbol of the power of men.
Bernays approached a group of militant debutante ladies and suggested that on the annual Easter Day parade in New York City they should go to the parade with hidden cigarettes, and they should make a great display of lighting them up and smoking in public.
Unbeknown to them, he informed the press that a group of suffragettes would be making a protest by lighting cigarettes, using these cigarettes as a symbol like “Torches of Freedom“ in their campaign for female emancipation.
On the day all the main news agencies and cameras were there to record the event, which created a great deal of excitement. News cameras filmed attractive and wealthy young women daring to smoke in full public gaze. This made news right across America.
Bernays had brilliantly linked together the ideals of “The Emancipation of Women” and “The Statue of Liberty,” the symbol of America, holding aloft the “Torch of Freedom” and his client's product, the cigarette.
Nobody could now stand against the idea of the Torch of Freedom, the symbol on which America and its army of immigrants had founded the country and freed themselves from British rule.
The taboo was broken forever. Bernays had demonstrated perfectly how he could control mass thinking and opinions using an illogical idea yet making it seem absolutely logical and rational.
The very idea that smoking in any way gave women any more power, freedom or emancipation is clearly illogical. The only thing it is ever likely to give them is bad breath and cancer.
Edward Bernays had demonstrated that by linking a product to an idea and an emotion you can motivate large groups of people to buy that product.
Smoking never gave American women more power or influence, but the act of smoking made them FEEL as if it did, and that made them feel good about themselves. That emotion motivated them to take up a completely irrational practice.
What Bernays had done may have been the first time that anybody had actively and consciously set out to alter people’s buying behavior by linking it to an emotion in their unconscious mind.
From that day sales of cigarettes to women began to rise, not only in America but across the world.
This event heralded a complete change in how companies advertised their products. Now they switched their entire sales and marketing to this new form of sales motivation.
Buy a copy on Amazon or Smashwords
0 comments