Shockingly Evil and Vile Marketing Advice from Freud

Sigmund Freud almost didn’t make it out of Vienna in 1938. He left on June 4th, on the Orient Express, three months after the German Army entered the city. Hitler and Stalin, between them, drove psychoanalysis out of Europe, but the movement reconstituted itself in two places where its practitioners were welcomed, London and New York. Once in America, psychoanalysis was thus improbably transformed into a largely Anglo-American medical and cultural phenomenon. During the twelve years that Hitler was in power, only about fifty Freudian analysts immigrated to the United States (a country Freud had visited only once, and held in contempt). They were some of the biggest names in the field, though, and they took over American psychiatry.

Among the Austrian implants in America was Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays (depicted above). While you may be unfamiliar with his name, you most certainly know his work. Women sporting cigarettes as a symbol of female empowerment and the ubiquitous bacon-and-egg breakfast were just two of his public relations campaigns, inspired by Freudian ideas. Bernays began his career shaping public opinion by creating a media campaign to raise awareness of venereal diseases. But his application of psychoanalytic principles to PR and marketing came only after reading Freud's "General Introductory Lectures," a gift from Freud to his nephew in thanks for a box of Havana cigars.

The Engineering of Consent

Having seen how effective propaganda could be during WWI, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime. Intrigued by Freud's notion that irrational forces drive human behavior, Bernays sought to harness those forces to sell products for his clients. In his 1928 book, "Propaganda," Bernays hypothesized that by understanding the group mind, it would be possible to manipulate people's behavior without their even realizing it. To test this hypothesis, Bernays launched one of his most famous public relations campaigns: convincing women to smoke.

In 1929, it was taboo for women to smoke in public and those who flouted convention were thought to be sexually permissive. Bernays' client was George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, who envisioned breaking this taboo to broaden the market for his Lucky Strike brand. Bernays asked Hill for permission to consult with New York's leading psychoanalyst and Freud disciple, Dr. A.A. Brill, and was granted the unusual request. When asked what cigarettes symbolized to women, Brill responded: "That's simple, cigarettes symbolize male power." Thence the "Torches of Freedom Parade," staged on 5th Avenue in downtown New York, was covered by newspapers nationwide and internationally.

Unsurprisingly, Freud's ideas have - by way of Bernays - gone on to influence everything about successful branding and marketing, by rooting ad techniques in an understanding of how to manipulate the human mind. Drawing on the insights of his uncle, Bernays developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided titans of industry the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but to the unconscious.

Gaming the The Irrational Mind

Imagine two commercials for a new light beer. The first ad begins with a super-zoom of the luxurious, golden liquid tumbling into a tall clear glass. "All of the taste you want in a rich beer," says a man's voice, "only half the calories."

The second ad starts in a bar. As a gaggle of unshaven men with floppy bellies are circling two beautiful women, like fat buzzards, a well-built man in a svelte black suit approaches the bar and orders a light beer. The women hear him and turn. He looks back. "Make that three," he tells the barkeep. The slogan appears: "Light is the new strong."

You can probably see where I'm going here. The first ad relies on facts. The second relies on emotional influence - a complex interplay of sex, power, security, and other unconscious drives that give life its sense and direction. According to Freud, if an ad can appeal to a deep wish, fantasy, aggression or some escape from life, then consumers will most likely equate that brand or product with the fulfilment of the desire. When Bernays equated smoking with challenging male dominance, his campaign went beyond the promotion of mere facts; it plumbed a deep-seated desire in the collective ethos of 1920s American women, and matched the smoking of Lucky Strikes with the desire for emancipation from a tyrannical patriarchy that dispossesses women.

While this doesn't exactly put Freud (or Bernays) on par with Hannibal Lecter, the power and perniciousness of these techniques become all the more clear once taken up by the Third Reich during WWII. The German politician Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his unique application of Freudian principles - despite the fact that both Freud and Bernays were Jewish. When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit these PR concepts to the fullest extent possible. It was he who created the “Fuhrer cult” around Adolph Hitler, a fanatical movement mobilized and sustained by the Bernaysian principles of consumer manipulation.

Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933, from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers. He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography:

"They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones."

Shockingly Evil and Vile?

What the writings of Freud and Bernays furnish is not a principle or tradition by which to evaluate the appropriateness of propaganda, but simply a means for shaping public opinion for any purpose whatsoever, whether beneficial to society or not.

Today, these principles continue to underpin PR and advertising. When companies want to gauge the probability of success for a new product, they will enlist market researchers to uncover the hidden motivations of a selected group of consumers to determine what might trigger their buying habits. They may utilize a number of techniques to discover these deeper meanings, such as role playing, picture interpretation, sentence completion, or word association, among others.

Such exercises - many of which were developed by Freud himself - can help researchers learn about how consumers react to products and how best to market them as a result. For example, buying a particular brand of computer can make a person feel smart, successful, productive, and prestigious. Marketers can use this information to cultivate brand identity.

When looking to apply something similar to your content, it’s worth asking yourself what your customer base could connect with about your brand. What nascent desire or unconscious need does your product fulfil? Crafting your message to target one of these needs is far more effective a sales technique than one that simply highlights facts about your product or service.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Freudian motivation theory posits that unconscious psychological forces, such as hidden desires and motives, shape an individual's behavior, like their purchasing patterns.
• Freudian motivation theory is frequently applied to a number of disciplines, including sales and marketing, to help understand the consumer's motivations when it comes to making a purchasing decision.
• The Freudian motivation theory explains the sales process in terms of a consumer fulfilling conscious, functional needs as well as unconscious needs.