The Hidden Persuaders

For better or worse, most American habits and tastes and institutions are eventually imported into Britain: American tobacco and films, American car-designs and hair-styles, even American accents-and American advertising techniques, some of them what many people would term sinister.

Thus the spine-chilling processes evolved and applied by American super-advertising-scientists are of considerable interest to potential victims-members of the mass market— in this country. Vance Packard draws back the curtain on the incredible world peopled by a new breed of men trained to probe the citizen’s unconscious for hidden desires and motives, and then to use their knowledge for the purpose of indoctrination, with higher sales as the end in view. Here we have the psychologist-turned-merchandiser and the publicist-turned-psychoanalyst combining to operate word-associations and symbol-manipulations, all geared to that old unconscious they know so much better than its owner.

Whether readers regard the activities of the new mental-depth advertisers as terrifying, disquieting, highly amusing or just rather charming, they will find much to engage their minds in a book with sub-titles like ‘The Built-in Sexual Overtone’, ‘Self-images for Everybody’, ‘Care and Feeding of Positive Thinkers’, and ‘ The Psycho-seduction of Children’.

And it would be a hard, unnatural reader who could turn away unmoved from the consideration that men think of a mistress when they see a convertible car in a showroom window.

Mr. Packard has, for fifteen years, been writing articles and books concerned to a large extent with new developments in the social sciences. Much of his work has been commended by specialist academicians like Dr. Pendleton Herring, President of the Social Science Research Council in the United States.