How Ernest Dichter Brought Psychology to Business

Anyone working in fields in which psychology intersects with business—marketing, marketing research, or advertising—should be familiar with Ernest Dichter. Before Dichter, what Franz Kreuzer and Patrick Schierholz called “announcement advertising” was the norm, with factual argument the prevailing method by which to promote products. Dichter turned ad agencies into psychology labs, bringing the social sciences into what were basically factories of communication. With his depth interviews, Dichter was the first person to seriously challenge the Claude Hopkins school of “reason-why” copy, which had dominated advertising since it was recognized as a legitimate field. “His research provided advertising with a kind of radar to find its way through the darkness of the collective subconscious,” wrote Marcel Blenstein-Blanchet, founder of the ad agency Publicis.

Dichter showed that sex was often lurking in the darkness. As researchers Thomas Cudlik and Christoph Steiner flatly put it, Dichter “brought sex into advertising,” this was a big factor in making him the first “star” of the field. It wasn’t sheer coincidence that the three studies which made Dichter famous (for Ivory soap, Plymouth, and Esquire) had to do with sex. “Man…is more strongly motivated by the pleasure principle than by the principle of reality,” Dichter said, convinced that, when it came to human motivation, the libido ruled.

Dichter’s combination of psychoanalytic theory and pragmatic optimism was a powerful one-two punch in postwar America, making him sort of a cross between Sigmund Freud and Norman Vincent Peale. (Dichter was even more optimistic than the famously positive futurist Hermann Kahn, who was a good friend and occasional collaborator.) His grounding in European philosophy, with its narrative, humanistic approach, was balanced out by a distinctly American brand of “positive thinking,” this transatlantic blend very appealing to the general public curious about psychology.

Psychology wasn’t new in the late 1930s, when Dichter came to America with his doctor’s bag of tricks, of course, but the use of it to influence consumer behavior certainly was. “All purchase motivations were already present [but] Dichter unearthed what was hidden, analyzed it, and made it usable for the consumers,” thought Kreuzer and Schierholz. By freeing the id from the chains of reason—what Dichter would later call the “strategy of desire”—American consumers could gain “moral permission” to enjoy the good things of life, something they weren’t very good at because of their deeply engrained Puritanical ethic.

Freud’s “pleasure principle” as interpreted by Dichter and applied to the world of consumer goods violated the principles of the superficially wholesome as mom-and-apple-pie-and-Chevrolet 1950s, certainly not as sensational as the Kinsey reports but shocking nonetheless. Dichter’s positive take on hedonism, what Cudlik and Steiner called a “prescription for social and individual therapy,” was in retrospect very much ahead of its time, foreshadowing the self-indulgence of the 1960s and 1970s.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Osgerby have each commented on Dichter’s fundamental tenet that consumers needed moral permission to enjoy, in his words, a “hedonistic approach to life.” “After the privations of the Depression and the war, Americans were supposed to enjoy themselves, held back from total abandon only by the need for Cold War vigilance,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich in her 1983 The Hearts of Men, with Playboy magazine the most visible example of this new, morally sanctioned and justified consumer ethic.

“To sustain an economy increasingly dependent on consumer demand, a break had to be made with value systems that emphasized thrift and conservative reserve,” Osgerby agreed in his 2001 Playboys in Paradise, “the new economic imperatives of postwar America demand[ing] a code of acquisitive consumerism and personal gratification.” And gratification is what Americans got, Osgerby argues, as the youth market and a more style-conscious, leisure-oriented middle-class set the tone for a “morality of pleasure” and “ethic of fun” beginning in the 1950s.

Working within the framework of this morality of pleasure, Dichter drew upon a startling array of sources to work his magic, borrowing ideas from literature, art, and folklore to interpret contemporary consumer culture. He was a true universalist, believing that the key to human behavior resided in individuals, not nations. Dichter was intent on identifying what he termed the “soul of things,” fully believing that the stuff of everyday life held “psychic content.” There were thus no “lifeless” things, everything around us having symbolic meaning inside or underneath their materiality.

As in fairy tales or myths, things in real life were emotionally inscribed, teeming with social or cultural significance. Wood then wasn’t just a material but a “symbol of life" for Dichter, glass something that represented uncertainty, ambiguity, and mystery. Products and brands carried particular power, he argued, functioning as extensions of consumers' unique personalities. Shoes were not just objects to protect one’s feet, they represented strength and independence (as in “Cinderella”), one’s hair representative of potency and virility (a la “Samson and Delilah”). In a consumer society like America, it was up to people to choose “correct” things and activities to convey the kind of status one sought, Dichter thought, this now well-accepted idea not just new but a bit disquieting a half-century ago.