Public Relations and the Depth Approach

The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry. Professional persuaders have seized upon it in their groping for more effective ways to sell us their wares—whether products, ideas, attitudes, candidates, goals, or states of mind.

This depth approach to influencing our behaviour is being used in many fields and is employing a variety of ingenious techniques. It is being used most extensively to affect our daily acts of consumption. Two-thirds of America’s hundred

largest advertisers have geared campaigns to this depth approach by using strategies inspired by what marketers call “motivation analysis’’. Many of the nation’s public-relations experts have been indoctrinating themselves in the lore of psychiatry and the social sciences in order to increase their skill at “engineering’’ our consent to their propositions. What the probers are looking for, of course, are the WHYS of our behaviour, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favour.

At one of the largest advertising agencies in America psychologists on the staff are probing sample humans in an attempt to find how to identify, and beam messages to, people of high anxiety, body consciousness, hostility, passiveness, and so on. Public-relations experts are advising churchmen how they can become more effective manipulators of their congregations. In some cases these persuaders even choose our friends for us. Friends are furnished along with the linen by the management in offering the homes for sale. Everything comes in one big, glossy package.

Sombre examples of the new persuaders in action are appearing not only in merchandising but in politics and industrial relations. The national chairman of a political party indicated his merchandising approach to the election of 19... by talking of his candidates as products to sell.

What the persuaders are trying to do in many cases was well summed up by one of their leaders, the president of the Public Relations Society of America, when he said in an address to members:“The stuff with which we work is the fabric of men’s minds.’’

All this probing and manipulation has its constructive and its amusing aspects; but also it has seriously antihumanistic implications. Much of it seems to represent regress rather than progress for man in his long struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being.

The subconscious salesmen, in groping for better hooks, deployed .in several directions. One direction they began exploring in a really major way was moulding of images; the creation of distinctive, highly appealing “personalities’’ for products that were essentially undistinctive. The aim was to build images that would arise before our “inner eye’’ at the mere mention of the product’s name, once we had been properly conditioned. Thus they would trigger our action in a competitive sales situation.

Most enterprising politicians were ehecking themselves in the mirrors to see if their images were on straight. “Printer’s Ink’’, the merchandisers’ trade journal, quoted a ranking Democrat as saying: “Any candidate is aware, of course, that the sooner he begins to build a favourable image of himself in relation to the issues of the day the more likely he is to come through.”