There are those who say that advertising has no effect on them, they buy what they want and when they want. Having been a salesman for most of my life I know this to be false. A salesman is probably the most useless job in society. As a salesman selling round the doors, before leaving the depot, I would check what was in stock and what carried the best bonus and that is what my clients would want and get. This would happen even although I got them to look through the entire catalogue if they wished.
Public opinion, culture and desires are shaped by the avalanche of advertising, (propaganda) that surges over us on a daily basis. The man who put this into top gear was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, one Edward Bernays. With one publicity stunt, he started American women on the road to lung cancer by getting them to smoke. What he did for women is still going on today, to all of us, across the full spectrum of worthless products.
The extract below is from an interesting article, (Engineering Consent) on this subject from Iconoclast:
Bernays was granted an opportunity to experiment on the minds of the public when American Tobacco Corporation president Tom Hill hired him to break the social taboo surrounding women who smoked cigarettes. Bernays consulted with prominent psycho-analyst A.A Brill, who told him that cigarettes were symbols of male sexual power. If Bernays could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, then women would smoke. With this in mind, Bernays persuaded a group of rich debutants to hide cigarettes in their clothes during New York’s annual Easter Parade, with the instruction that all at once, they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically. He then informed the press that a group of suffragettes were preparing to protest male domination by igniting what he called “torches of freedom” during the parade. The press was desperate to photograph the event, which linked the idea of liberty to the defiant act of women smoking. The plan was a success; the story broke nation-wide, and the sale of cigarettes to women began to rise overnight. Through this social experiment, Bernays learned that he could infuse powerful meanings onto irrelevant objects. Consumer choices would no longer be based on careful reasoning, but instead would become expressions of individuality; each product would be a personal investment.Read the full article HERE:
