The Technician of Desire

Abstract

This chapter deals with the theories of Ernest Dichter, the father of motivation research. It considers his methods, mainly depth analysis, to find what motivates people, and his notion that motivation research can be used for socially positive functions, such as fighting racism and anti-Semitism. An example of his thinking is shown in a discussion of the different reasons people use cigarette lighters, which are related to their conscious, preconscious, and unconscious motivations. Dichter argues that marketers often make false assumptions about how rational people are and neglect irrational elements in their psyches, generally buried deep in the unconscious realms of their psyches. He stresses the importance of analyzing the objects people own as a means to understanding them and their behavior. He offers an analysis of the reasons people like horror stories and suggests that the media are useful since they teach people about life and provide various gratifications. He argues that the function of motivation research is not to convince people to buy things they don’t need but to serve as a bridge between consumers and manufacturers and to be used in a positive way for socially constructive goals.

Motivation research, or in-depth studies of consumers, elicited criticism both within and outside the industry, because it represented a way of thinking about the consumer that seemed to violate many people’s sense of propriety. To Ernest Dichter, the major advocate of motivation research, the criticism implied that advertising was seeking to exploit the consumer’s presumed unconscious and often irrational attachments to particular things. In fact, it was a natural extension of modern psychological theory and methods to advertising. Motivation research borrowed at least two major premises from Freudian psychology: that people’s real motives are hidden, and that they can be elicited through conversation and free association.

William Leiss, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, Jacqueline Botterill, Social Communication in Advertising, 3rd Edition

For Dichter, the notion that we buy in response to motivations curried in our cranial muck set him on the path to a remarkable career. In no time he had Madison Avenue eating Sachar Tortes out of the palm of his hand. Through the fifties American experienced an abiding infatuation with Freudian theory, which posited convincing psychological explanations for why company men in the city and housewives in the suburbs downed martinis and gobbled Milltown. Numerous sources of angst festered beneath the bucolic surface of white-collar tranquility—Rat Race Angst, Finger-on-the-Button Angst, Too-Damn-Many-Kids Underfoot Angst. Dichter sold the Sell Side on the idea that it should hire him to burrow into the strata beneath what he described as “the smooth, lush, green fertile lawn of the human personality.” Through psycho-aeration of that lawn, he could get at what was “hollow, rotten, and cavernous underneath.” Thus would Dichter drag American shoppers to the couch, pull up a chair, adjust his horn rims, and proceed to pry us open.

Lee Eisenberg, Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What. 2009. (pp. 52–53)