The Manipulators

If You Are a junior executive or middle management man being considered for promotion, the pleasant fellow sharing martinis with you – chatting casually about seemingly trivial, unrelated topics, ordering rounds of drinks until you become mellow and expansive and relaxed – may be a hired mind-prober, an Mr man. That innocent-looking form you are asked to fill out and those inkblots you are asked to interpret and any other tests excluding the purely physical to which you are subjected will, in all likelihood, have been drawn up by an Mr man. And it will be an Mr man who will submit a report to your employer that could say something like this: "He has fine qualifications, good college training, excellent appearance, poise and agile mental abilities. Our analysis detected, however, a potential source of real difficulty: his concept of authority. He sees his associates as competitive persons whom he must outwit." And you, sir, are not only unpromoted, you are out. Out looking for a new job – answering more questions and filling out new forms and reacting to different inkblots and drinking martinis with other pleasant strangers who smile and laugh and chew olives while they secretly evaluate your college training, your appearance, your poise, your mental abilities and (here we go again) your concept of authority.

Or – if your concept of authority measures up – something else may disqualify you, such as the loving devotion of your wife. A would-be exec's wife "must not demand too much of her husband's time or interest" since "even his sexual activity is relegated to a second ary place," subordinate to "his singleminded concentration on his job."

Though having the ring of something that might happen in Orwell's fictional year 1984, this is going on in the factual year 1957. The stuff in quotation marks you've just read is lifted almost verbatim from two quite corporeal sources – an actual report submitted to a flesh-and-blood employer by an all-too-real consulting psychologist and a report by two sociologists on a study made of the conjugal relations of 8300 executives. The subject of the first report was sure enough pounding the pavements not long after the report was handed in. Whether or not he succeeded in finding another executive position was not recorded by the psychologist who made the report – a psychologist who, knowing which side his Ph.D. is buttered on, is engaged in the highly profitable business of Motivation Research, or MR.

MR is the new multimillion dollar industry devoted, as its name implies, to exploring the deep-down motives of people. These motives are explored for many reasons but chiefly to find out what makes a consumer tick, what makes you and me buy or refuse to buy a product.

A company about to spend $25,000,000 introducing a new brand of cigarette wants to know how the public will respond to it. Does the product have the exciting psychological overtones needed to become a crashing success? Or are there hidden reefs ahead, deep in the public's psyche? If so, perhaps the image to be offered to the public can be reshaped before it is too late.

It's no longer considered entirely safe simply to ask people how they are going to react. They may not know, or they may unknowingly give misleading responses. If you ask a group of males what they think of black as a color for a product they will almost unanimously say they don't care much for black. When, however, a woman appears be-fore them in a black negligee they will respond more pleasurably than if she is clad in any other color. Most of them couldn't tell you why. The explanation is that while black itself is an unappealing color it is a perfect negative and thus makes anything next to it – or inside it – look good.

Then, too, people may not want to reveal their real motives for accepting or rejecting a product. Their actual motives may not seem admirable or particularly logical. One of the more expensive misjudgments in marketing history occurred in the early 1950s when Chrysler Corporation decided that the time was propitious for a more compact, easily parkable car. Many people, when asked, complained about the trouble they had parking the "big, fat cars" then widely prevalent. Chrysler spent millions trimming down the design of its cars. When the new line was offered to the public the company almost went to the wall. Its share of the auto market dropped from 26% to 12% in two years.

Thus sobered, Chrysler looked more deeply into the things people want in cars (among other things they are looking for a prestige symbol) and over-hauled its styling. Today Chrysler has some of the longest, most colorful, highest-tailed cars on the market, and is enjoying a spectacular resurgence in popularity.

The growing similarity of competing products in the same field made motivation study seem a pressing necessity to desperate marketers. Often the real differences between rival brands of beer, tobacco, gasoline, orange juice were too subtle or slight to be persuasive with the average consumer. Since marketers considered it a matter of utmost urgency that consumers by the millions fall head over heels in love with their particular brand – whether there was a logical basis for that exclusive love or not – they began trying to infuse their product's image with personality traits consumers could love. Gasolines became folksy or lordly or prudent or playful.

As the nation's automated factories achieve the capacity to turn out far more products than the public really needs, the men in executive suites ponder less about problems of production and much, much more about the problems of persuading the public to buy more of their goods. This, of course, brings greater power to those professional persuaders, the ad men. Each year the amount they can spend in campaigns of persuasion rises higher and higher.

All these factors – the outpouring and standardization of products and the unpredictability of the consumer – impelled the ad men to turn in growing numbers to MR. or the depth approach to consumers. This year two thirds of the nation's largest advertisers had geared campaigns to MR. (At one of the world's largest ad agencies every single client product now gets a thorough checking over from the MR boys for hidden factors that may influence sales.)

In their diagnosing, The Manipulators of Motivation Research first study people in depth to find all the possible hidden desires, needs and drives that might be harnessed to promote the product in question. (One agency has even been studying the emotional state of women at various phases of their menstrual cycle in order to isolate the appeals that are most effective at each phase.) This probing of the subconscious is done largely by techniques borrowed from the psychiatric clinics. The doctors conduct "depth interviews" which are abbreviated psychoanalytic sessions, without the couch. One of their favorite probing techniques is the projective test. You are shown a vague picture and asked to comment. In commenting you project some of yourself into the picture.

One of the more picturesque of these picture-probes is called the Szondi, which assumes we are all aberrants. A leading ad agency used it on whiskey drinkers to find what appeals would be most persuasive with the real two-fisted guzzlers (who buy most of the booze sold). In this one you are shown eight pictures of men and asked which you would rather have for a train companion. What you are not told is that all eight are suffering from eight kinds of mental aberration. The man you feel the greatest kinship for, so the thinking goes, suffers excessively from the same emotional state that possesses you mildly.

These pictures were shown to men when they were sober and then again after they had tossed off three shots. A change of personality came over the men, the research director says, that "would make your hair stand on end." He has concluded that men do not drink heavily to drown presumed troubles. They drink for the exhilarating change of personality they experience.

Once the vulnerabilities of the public to a product are analyzed and charted, psychological hooks are fashioned, baited and placed out in the merchandising sea to snare the unsuspecting consumer.

Many of us realize, of course, that we are the targets of more than our share of sly blandishments, but some of us may not be aware of all the carefully fashioned techniques of persuasion being focused on us: in the interest of possible enlightenment, it might not be a bad idea to examine some of these techniques frequently used to persuade males.

One favored technique is to build into the product a personality which the buyers like to think they themselves possess. Thus, in effect, the product can become a self-image of the buyer. The promoters of vodka were able to send sales skyrocketing by convincing consumers they could, by drinking vodka, convey to the world how exciting and advanced they themselves were. These early vodka enthusiasts were mainly the kind of people who enjoyed ordering a screwdriver just to watch the eyebrows lift.

The sale of self-images has been most dramatically successful in the automotive field, where investigators have charted the personality of every major make. Buick, for example, was widely promoted some months ago with this line: "It makes you feel like the man you are." According to Social Research, (continued on page 38) Manipulators (continued from page 26) Inc., which did a massive study of auto personalities, the Buick personality matches up with that of substantial, socially mobile people who still aspire to rise higher in social status.

In general, people who want to seem conservative, serious and responsible tend to buy dark-colored sedans with a minimum of accessories and gadgets, whereas those who like to be known for their dash and flair prefer hardtops, two-tone paint jobs, many accessories and gadgets.

Once the image analysts get a line on a few of the product-images we buy, they claim a pattern emerges which enables them to forecast how we will behave in other buying situations. I was having lunch with two Chicago psychologists who have studied the "per-sonality" of many products. One of them said: "Now take the man who drives a Studebaker, smokes Old Golds, uses cream-based hair oil, an electric shaver, carries a Parker 51 fountain pen. Obviously he is a salesman, an active man, agressive in face-to-face situations and wants to make a good impression. Probably he was quite an active lover in his youth." The other psychologist added: "Also, you will find that he is wearing loud shorts."

Another technique of manipulation which has been getting considerable attention is that of offering people relief from their secret fears and guilt feelings. Millions of people, it seems, still have a strong streak of puritanism in their make-up and consequently have responded more uneasily than gratefully to many of the products being offered so invitingly today, especially the self-indulgent and easy-living variety. It still bothers such people, at a subconscious level, to smoke, drink, consume sizable amounts of candy or soft drinks, use ready-mix preparations or even use vacuum cleaners or power tools.

MR found that the cigarette makers were remiss in failing to deal realistically with the guilt and anxiety feelings, how-ever seemingly buried, of smokers. They charged that the makers were not fashioning messages that played upon the core meanings of smoking. The sell-ing messages most often used in the early Fifties either pictured smokers with dreamy faces or they hammered at the health promise that their particular brand would not kill the user. Pierre Martineau, research director of The Chicago Tribune and a missionary for MR, snorted: "I can't imagine a whiskey advertiser in folksy, confidential tones telling people to 'guard against cir-rhosis of the liver' or proclaiming that 'a 10-month study by leading medical authorities showed no cases of acute or chronic alcoholism.'" He was so thoroughly convinced the cigarette makers were off base that he hired Social Re-search to study 350 typical smokers in depth.

SRI investigators uncovered a host of Freudian reasons people smoke despite misgivings about the habit. They smoke to relieve inner tensions ... to find oral gratification (in a sort of substitute breast) ... to give their hands a chance to do something familiar and well-organized (which contributes to a feel-ing of well-being) ... to achieve poise when entering a strange room ... to prove their daring ... to give them-selves a rewarding break.

The major discovery of the investigators, however, was that Americans se-cretly see smoking as proof of virile ma-turity. The report stated: "Americans smoke – and in increasing numbers – to prove that they are virile, to demon-strate their energy, vigor and potency. This is a psychological satisfaction sufficient to overcome health fears, to with-stand moral censure, ridicule or even the paradoxical weakness of 'enslave-ment to a habit.' Young people who smoke are trying to be older; and older people who smoke are trying to be younger."

The investigators made the further interesting discovery that despite the great increase in feminine smoking in recent years people in general still think of smoking as proof of manliness and as a "man's activity."

The Marlboro people may have been influenced by this last finding when they ordered a sexual transvestism of their product, which had been highly feminine in its appeal. In this sexual flip-flop the new Marlboro came out with a bold, red-topped package which researchers found particularly appealing to men. Ads proclaimed the smoke's "man-sized flavor." The ads also suddenly began showing typical Marlboro smokers as extremely virile-looking men intensely preoccupied in a task and giv-ing themselves a deserved break by smoking. All had tattoos – symbols of masculinity – on the backs of their hands. While winning new male inter-est Marlboro was able to hold on to many of its women. It called its new-imaged smoke: "A man's cigarette that women like too."

Professional persuaders found they could also increase their potency in sell-ing products by playing upon our hid-den needs. One hidden need which The Manipulators found in many men was for a sense of power. A gasoline pro-ducer, after a depth study, began ham-mering out the two words total power in connection with its product. This seeming need to give males a feeling of power helps explain much of the strain-ing by auto makers to put more and more horses under the hood, even though by 1957 the stock models of many makes of cars could already go twice as fast as the highest legal speed limit posted in America (65mph).

Various investigators found that many men see the power of their car almost as an extension of their own sexual potency. One Midwestern ad agency concluded, after some depth-probing, that one important reason why many men like to buy a new and more power-ful car every year or two is that it gives them a renewed sense of power. The report said, "It gives the buyer reas-surance of his own masculinity, an emotional need which his old car fails to deliver."

This male need for a sense of power has likewise been carefully weighed in the sale of power boats, which outsell sailboats with men eight to one. The Institute for Motivational Research, in a study for the boating industry, found that many men seem to use their boats to express a sense of power in "almost a sexual way." It quoted one man, an executive, who was depth-interviewed, as explaining in his reverie: "With a good power boat you can show you are all man and let her rip – without having the fear you are bound to have on the road." When the male sets out to buy himself another boat – whether it is his second, third, fourth or fifth – there is one thing you can be sure he'll want: a bigger surge of power than his old boat was able to deliver.

The sexual symbolism of products became a growing preoccupation of MR. Fountain pens have been appraised for their adequacy as satisfying phallic symbols. Convertibles were viewed by one MR man as symbolic mistresses, whereas sedans were viewed as symbolic wives.

At this particular season of the year, it might be interesting to contemplate how MR has even penetrated – via Freudian Probing – as simple-seeming and wholesome a matter as the selection of Christmas cards. Yet it has not only done so, but it employed the most trans-parently Freudian symbolism in the assay. Designs bearing a female symbol (wreath) and a male symbol (candle) were used singly, in combination but not in contact, and with the candle in-serted in the wreath. In a random sampling of buyers, cards with a candle design alone proved most popular with women, those with wreaths alone appealed to men, but younger buyers of both sexes were heavily in favor of the candle-in-wreath design.

A study of the problems that might arise if gasoline stations went self-service reportedly resulted in a cautionary con-clusion, with sexual symbolism inspiring (continued on page 62) Manipulators (continued from page 38) the caution. It seems that women, especially in the suburbs, now buy a very large portion of all gasoline purchased. Researchers found that a great many women would resist, unconsciously, taking the hose and inserting it in the opening of their gas tank.

Now that women are invading this man's world more and more, The Manipulators discovered many males seem to respond with special enthusiasm to products they can still call their own. One is the cigar: women, Anne Baxter notwithstanding, still haven't tried to take up stogie-smoking. Cigar sales recently have reached the highest level in a quarter century.

The cigar intrigued the MR men because it is an example of pure masculine imagery. It is commonly associated with fight managers, construction bosses, gangsters. When men get together at exclusively male functions, many who normally smoke cigrettes light up cigars.

One prominent ad exec who became tantalized by the cigar's symbol potentialities was Edward Weiss of Chicago. His interest was aroused when a cigar campaign that pictured a beaming lady passing cigars out to a group of men ran aground. He ordered a psychiatric study. It concluded the ad was dead wrong because one of the big satisfactions men get out of cigar-smoking is the knowledge that many women find cigar-smoking in their presence objectionable and ungentlemanly. The male smokes the cigar in their presence to show he is still untamed. When a male at a mixed gathering asks ladies if they object to his smoking his cigar, Weiss says, the male is being something less than genuinely concerned. He is in fact proclaiming his refusal to be sexually muted. As Mr. Weiss explained it: "He knows darned well he is going to stink up the room."

Whiskers are one symbol of manliness women couldn't affect even if they wanted to; and so the morning stubble has quietly risen in esteem with male possessors. Shrewd shave-cream makers have begun stressing the toughness of beards. A psychiatrically-oriented New York ad agency asked a sampling of males how many of them would be interested in a new miracle cream (apparently mythical) which in three applications would rid them of their beard forever. Almost unanimously the men said they wouldn't be interested.

Another technique of persuasion-in-depth that has become popular is to beam messages at specific social classes. Most Americans like to believe that they believe they are progressing toward a totally democratic society. The Manipulators know better and have the populace all charted by layers, from upper-upper down to lower-lower.

Social Research, which has pioneered the layer approach to marketing, tells the story of a young son of an Italian immigrant. While living among his kinsfolk he learned to turn for his bottled uplift to red wine. Later, when he went to work in logging camps, he developed contempt for red wine and learned to favor beer. Still later, when he got to a white collar job as a junior executive in Detroit, he spurned beer in favor of whiskey. The final turn came when he became quite successful and secure as an executive – and returned to drinking primarily plain red wine. At that station in life it was a completely appropriate and even sophisticated thing to do.

A chicago beer that developed social aspirations came down with some interesting complications. One of the city's leading brews, its popularity had been confied largely to the boys in the taverns until its makers set out to push it into the better homes. They illustrated their ambition by showing the beer being sipped by socialities, for hunters and concert pianists. Some slight improvement in sales was noted in the better areas of town; but sales dropped disastrously in the taverns. Social Research, in a subsequent study of beer and social class, concluded that beer drinking in America is an informal, predominantly middle-class custom and that upper class people should be shown drinking it only when they are at their most informal and demonstrating what good fellows they are.

Perhaps the nifties device of The Manipulators is what they call "Psychological obsolescence." This follows a one-two pattern. First you create style consciousness for a product: then you switch styles. It was pioneered of course in female fashions and in car design. However, it soon spread to the sale of such things as refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, telephones andmost interesting of allmen's clothing. A multimillion dollar campaign was launched to shake men out of their lethargy and make them style-responsive.

From the style-manipulators' standpoint, men have always been far too timid and conservative about their apparel. They are satisfied to wear a suit they like, Ivy League or otherwise, year after year. If they are married, they spend far less on clothing than their wives, even though they are out in the world more, making an impression. As Mr. Martinequ complained: "The American male has never been completely sold on the concept of style in clothing." He urged that the male be made aware that "something exciting is going on." The men's clothing industry hired expert persuaders and raised a $2,000,000 war chest"to force the average man out of a drab routine of stereotyped garb into a seasonal, volatile, style-conscious class." One major hat maker devised the cheering message: "Every hat you own just went out of style!"

One big lever the doctors discovered for prodding males into the new "seasonal, volatile, style-conscious" scheme of things was Woman. As Mr. Martineau explained, girlfriends, secretaries, wives and mothers "can do a tremendous job of exerting pressure on a man to make him dress right."

Another technique is that of rooting out hidden resistances to products and then charting a "rediscovery" of the product with the buried stigma removed.

When male smokers began worrying about the health hazard of cigarette smoking, the makers of cigarette holders thought they saw a chance to recruit millions of new customers. They moved in, but with disappointing results. There was a strong undercurrent of resistance to the idea. Depth probers for the Institute for Motivational Research attributed the resistance to the fact many men felt that only sissies and women used holders. Another interesting discovery was that many of the older, more prosperous men – the natural targets for a the holder campaign – still held a grudge against the holder because they associated it, deep in their memories, with an ex-president of the U.S. the memory of "That man!" – with his holder clenched jauntily in his mouth – still raised many a hackle. The Institute helped guide the client past these resistances by designing a short, stubby holder in masculine browns and blacks that hardly looked like a holder at all; and user were shown in such he-man pursuits as watching baseball games.

Tire makers have had another sort of booby-trap to harass them, the depth doctors found. It seems that most of us first become aware of the brand name of the tire on our car at the worst possible moment: when we've just had a blowout. Feeling dismayed and irritated, we squat down to inspect the faithless tire, and for the first time the brand name is seared in our memory. The researchers urged tire makers to counsel car owners to make periodic inspections of their tires, ostgensibly to check on their condition, but actually just to impress the brand name upon the motorists at happier times.

Many car owners, in thinking of their cars almost as an extension of themselves, resent any unappreciative handling it gets or any unflattering remarks made about it, regardless of how used and forlorn it may look. One MR counselor (concluded on page 87) Manipulators (continued from page 62) has admonished car dealers to forego their long-time habit of kicking the tires when they inspect a car being brought in on a trade. The owner of the old car is apt to take that kick personally, and take his patronage elsewhere.

As we all know, buying and selling has been going on in the world quite a while and, ever since the beginning, the sellers have done their damnedest to convince the buyers they needed such-and-such an urn, or carpet, or love-potion, whether the buyers actually needed them or not. There is nothing new in this. What is new – and what some thoughtful observers consider frightening and morally reprehensible – is the grim efficiency such persuasion is taking in our time and the plain unfairness of what used to be a pretty fair tug of war. In olden days, buyer and seller fought as equals, and the buyer could be a most cagey cuss indeed, exercising the sapient strategy immortalized by Solomon in one of the proverbs: "'It is naught, it is naught,' saith the buyer; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth." Today, however, the sellers are amassing every force known to modern psychology in a concerted effort to burrow inside the buyer's mind and manipulate him, make it impossible for him to say "It is naught." Buyers and sellers are no longer equals: the buyer is a single layman with only his own personal compulsions and intelligence to guide him; while the seller has become a vast, enormously expensive machine relentlessly dedicated to manufacturing consent. And whether the seller is selling products or political aspirants makes little difference. The question that arises has been phrased thus by one disturbed public relations man: "What degree of intensity is proper in seeking to arouse desire, hatred, envy, cupidity, hope ...?"

What degree of intensity, indeed? Where does it stop? Does it stop at all? A recent editorial in Art Direction magazine said. "The power to influence mass minds is Orwellian in its proportions. It is as potentially devastating to the minds, the morals and the emotions as the H-bomb is to the material world about us." Already, through what the electrical engineers are calling bio-control, animals with full stomachs have been made to feel hungry. The Manipulators go to a lot of trouble and spend a lot of time and money making us hungry for foods and cars and clothes we don't need. Wouldn't it be a lot easier for them if they could simply press a button? This, of course, is not possible for The Manipulators of 1957.

But 1984 is less than 30 years away.