Chapters like ‘The psychoseduction of children’ and ‘Self-images for everybody’ left no doubt about Packard’s moral contempt for marketing’s uses of psychological techniques. His criticism was that marketers typically see consumers as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, and irrational emotional blockages. Hence, according to them, people satisfy some of these suppressed desires by using socially acceptable products.

Interestingly, 50 years later, some of their findings about the motives of consumers for buying products are startling and are valid till today. Here is a list of some interesting studies reported by Packard.

On shaving: For some men, the act of cutting the beard, a manly attribute is symbolic of the act of castration. Hence it is not a wise thing to show the act in advertisements for blades. Rather, they show a female, feeling the cheek of a man, thereby bringing in the concept of being attractive to the opposite sex to overcome the castration feeling.

On smoking: Smoking is done to satisfy the primary impulse and need of oral comfort. Smoking in general serves to relieve tension, impatience, anger and frustration, just as sucking does to the infant. This explains the widespread use of chewing gums, cigars and pan masala.

On selling soaps and detergents: Many housewives feel they are engaged in unrewarded and unappreciated drudgery when they clean. The advertiser should, thus, foster the wife’s feeling of ‘worth and esteem’. His advertising should exalt the role of housekeeping not in self-conscious, stodgy ways but by various implications making it known what an important and proud thing it is or should be to be a housewife.

On why people brush their teeth: People are motivated by differing reasons based on their personality. Some people, particularly hypochondriacs, are concerned about those germs and are swayed by a ‘decay’ appeal. Another group, mostly extroverts, brush their teeth in the hope they will be bright and shiny. The majority of people, however, brush their teeth for a reason that has little to do with dental hygiene. They put the brush and paste into their mouth in order to give their mouth a thorough purging, to get rid of the bad taste that has accumulated overnight. In short, they are looking for a taste sensation, as a part of their ritual of starting the day afresh.

Why old women like gardening: Because gardening gives older women a chance to keep on growing things after they have passed the childbearing stage.

Why women buy makeup items: Firstly, a woman wants to be able to look approvingly at herself and feel assured she is fully feminine. Secondly, she wants the approval of other women. The approval of the male as typified in advertisements — the admiring glance of a romantic-looking male — was found to be the least effective way of the three to sell make-up items. Simply showing a woman with the makeup item in a full-length mirror would be an effective method.

Why cone ice-creams are popular: People like to sink their mouth right into the ice-cream and get the full taste of it. This is a typical animal behaviour.

Symbolism of soup: Soup is unconsciously associated with a man’s deepest need for nourishment and reassurance. It takes people back to their earliest sensations of warmth, protection, and feeding. Its deepest roots may lie in prenatal sensations of being surrounded by the amniotic fluid in the mother’s womb.

On colours to be used for packaging: Red and yellow are helpful in creating hypnotic efforts. The woman’s eye is most quickly attracted to items wrapped in red; the man’s eye to items wrapped in blue.

On instant foods: A woman is very serious when she is baking a cake because unconsciously she is going through the symbolic act of giving birth. She dislikes easy-to-use cake mixes because the easy life evokes a sense of guilt.

When instant coffee was introduced in the market, there was tremendous resistance from consumers. In order to find out the underlying reasons for the resistance, the researchers constructed two identical shopping lists with the only change being that shopping list I had ‘ground coffee’ and shopping list II had ‘instant coffee’. These two lists were given to housewives and they were asked to comment on, “what type of housewife would have prepared shopping list I and shopping list II?” They invariably said that shopping list I was prepared by a home-loving, caring and a good housewife and the list II would have been prepared by a woman who spends most of her time outside her home and a woman who does not care for her husband and children. This clearly established the personalities people associated with product use.

A prophetic prediction for the future by Vance Packard stated: “Eventually — say by A. D. 2000 — perhaps all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old-fashioned. By then, perhaps, biophysicists will take over with “biocontrol’, which is depth persuasion carried to its ultimate. Bio-control is the new science of controlling mental processes, emotional reactions, and sense perceptions by bioelectrical signals.”

Scientists have been trying to explain human behaviour for centuries, and one of the more interesting techniques was phrenology, or the use of head shapes to characterise personality. Phrenologists believed that the shape and size of various areas of the brain (and, therefore, the overlying skull) determined personality.

Ad agencies have pursued an active interest in psychology to understand consumer behaviour. Today, surveys and experiments are often used to ‘copy test’ audience recall or to measure attitudes in response to creative executions. Psychographics is another technique of categorising consumers according to their ‘values and lifestyles’, the better to exploit their deep motivations.

A study by an Indian ad agency divides women into three psychographic clusters — Mrs UptoDate, who is trendy, likes to try out new things and is highly ad prone; Mrs NoNonsense who is individualistic, conservative, self-centred and not trendy; and Mrs NextDoorNeighbour, who is easygoing, does not take risks, and is a follower who holds on to traditional views. Perception Analyser Systems (PAS) are used in India to analyse reactions to commercials. People are shown commercials and asked to record their reactions through a dial or a joystick attached to a computer. This data is captured real-time on a computer, on a second-by-second basis.

Currently, there is a buzz around the idea of ‘neuromarketing’, the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to record brain activity in minute detail, measuring how the products they are selling affects the brain’s pleasure centres. Simply put, MRI scanners measures the flow of oxygen to different parts of the brain, indicating activity or thought in those regions. It’s the apparent mind-reading capability of the machine that makes it so alluring to an increasing number of people in the market-research community.

Martin Lindstrom, after a three-year long, $7-million neuro-marketing study, produced a book Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy in 2008. Using brain-scan technology to test how marketing stimuli affect the sub-conscious, Lindstrom and his team called into question many common beliefs about marketing.

One interesting study was for the Mini Cooper by Daimler-Chrysler. They showed pictures of cars to consumers while using MRIs to study the chemical changes in their brains. Unexpectedly, when the image of a Mini Cooper passed before their eyes, a “back area of the brain that responds to faces came alive.” Turns out it wasn’t the Mini Cooper’s “ultra rigid body” or its “1.6L 16-valve alloy engine” that attracted consumers; it was its irresistible face. What they were doing was adding a personality of warmth and fuzziness to the car, in the same way that the factory might add ventilated front disc brakes or cruise control. When you drive it, you will genuinely experience the sense of endearment that you might feel when surrounded by adorable children.

Some consumers who prefer Pepsi to Coke when they take a blind taste test, Lindstrom reports, prefer Coke to Pepsi when they know what they’re drinking. His MRI test of 67 subjects explains why. Drinking Coke more significantly increases blood flow in the medial prefrontal cortex because its ad campaigns, over the years, have so effectively associated Coke with sensations of warmth, security and childhood innocence.

Years ago, Revlon founder Charles Revson dryly observed that “in the factory, we make perfume; in the store we sell hope.” He was, of course, thinking of the romantic possibilities that Revlon’s ads linked with its product.

Neuromarketing can now pinpoint where in our brain such hope is triggered and tells a marketer which ad campaign will send the most blood there.

Lindstrom’s study found that printing health warnings on tobacco product packages does not have much of an impact on smoking behaviour. The researchers concluded that the warnings not only didn’t help, but triggered a stronger craving. The very warnings intended to reduce smoking might well be an effective marketing tool for Big Tobacco. When the research team compared consumers’ brain activity while viewing images involving brands, religion, and sports figures, the activity evoked by strong brands was much like that caused by religious images. For example, the Apple brand inspires the same reaction in peoples’ brains as religious imagery is interesting.

Neuromarketing is not free from criticism. Measurements are basically taken in a contrived environment and are far away from the point of decision-making where several other factors come in to play. Indeed, in the view of some neuroscientists and marketing researchers, the notion that the human brain should be studied in isolation is deeply flawed to begin with. Measuring the brain’s reaction to a TV spot simply does not provide enough data to extrapolate future behaviour. Studying how a person interacts within the larger culture is far more important.

Vance Packard’s disapproval of marketing’s psychological influence would gain ready acceptance if it were to be published today. If anything, our suspicion of marketers has deepened even as our obsession with brands has grown. Marketers probably contribute to this negative PR by making overblown claims about their capability to predict human behaviour.

(The writer is Director, Kotler-Srinivasan Centre for Research in Marketing, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.)

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