LECTURE 01: CONSUMERISM, PERSUASION, SOCIETY, BRAND + CULTURE

Aims

• Analyse the rise if the US consumerism
• Discuss the links between consumerism and out unconscious desires
• Looking at the work of Sigmund Freud
• Looking at the work of Edmund Bernays
• Consumerism as social control

Books

• Century of Self - Adam Curtis (2002)
• No Logo - Naomi Klien (1999)

Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)

• New theory of human nature
• Psychoanalysis
• Hidden primitive sexual forces and animal instincts which needed controlling
• The interpretation of dreams (1899)
• The unconscious (1915)
• The Ego and the ID (1923)
• Beyond the pleasure principle (1920)

Freud's model of personality structure.

Civilisation & It's discontents (1930)

• Fundemental tension between civilization and the individual 
• Human instincts incompatible with the well being of community
• The pleasure principle
• Humanity will always been unsatisfied in their pleasures are not met.
• WW1 was a testament to all of his theories, about humanity (1914 - 1918)

Edward Bernays (1891 - 1995)

• Press Agent
• Employed by public information during WW1
• Post war - set up "The council of Public relation"
• Birth of PR
• Based on the ideas of Freud (his uncle)
• Crystallising public opinion (1923)
• Propaganda (1928)

Torches of freedom (1929 Easter day Parade)

• Employed by tobacco company to try and get women to smoke
• Payed beautiful and debutante women to walk in the middle of the easter day parade and at a organised moment, they all lit up a cigarette, to look cool.
• Edward told the press they were suffragettes and that it was a protests against women oppression and they were represented as torches of freedom.
• Seen as sexy, independent
• Product placement
• Celebrity endorsements, he and the celebrities would gain money.
• The use of pseudo-scientific reports 

Fordism

• Henry Ford (1863-1947)
• Transposes Taylorism to car factories of Detroit
• Moving assembly line
• Standard production models built as they move through the factory
• Requires large investment, but increases productivity so much that relatively high wages can be paid, allowing the workers to buy the product the produce.
• The Model T Ford, 1908 -1927

When people had disposable income, this was the start of consumerism.

Chivers jam the way its advertised  - ' I see you were lucky to' no body wants any other jam everyone wants chivers.

Oldsmobile (1909)

advertising changed to more physiological selling. Fuelling peoples desires. Targeting to men who want to improve there image. Very quickly marketing begins to feed of it. Linking male sexual virility to a car.

Cadillac (1919)

Not sold on it's virtues but sold on its symbolic power of status, affluence and success and the desire to reach it.

Coco Chanel
False needs based on desire, people don't want these things they just feed their desire."I want to be a fantasy figure, just like the movie stars"

The needs and desires, could create a crisis of over production for consumers.

The Hidden Persuaders - Vance Packard (1957)

Marketing hidden needs

• Selling emotional security
• Selling reassurance of worth
• Selling ego-gratification (the idea that you are successful and important)
• Selling creative objects
• Selling love objects
• Selling sense of power
• Selling a sense of roots
• Selling of immortality 

A birth of a society that believes its free, happy and successful but in actuality people are given the illusion that they are happy through buying these things.

1920 

• A New elite is needed to manage the bewildered herd
• 'Manufacturing consent' 
• Public opinion - Walter Lippmann 
• A form of propaganda and political strategy to stop a revolution

Russian Revolution 1917

• The working class, took over the people in power
• Peace, Land , Bread! - John. J . Vail

Black Tuesday October 24, 1929

One of the biggest up market crashes on wall street, and the american market exploded. This then lead to the great depression.

• Roosevelt and the 'New Deal' (1933-36)
• Introduced;
• Benefits
• Wellfare
• Social security
• Job creation
• Pension
• Investment in Industry

Big companies were anti roosevelt as they would make them loose money.  

The worlds fair of 1940 in New York also know as The Futurama, was an exhibition of what america could look like and the depiction of what the world could look like if peoples faith was put back into consumerism. 'Democracity".

Society is based on the illusion of freedom based on consumption. 

• Consumerism is an ideological product
• We believe that through consumption our desires can be met
• The consumer self
• The legacy of Bernays / PR can be felt in all aspects of C21st society
• The conflicts between alternative models of social organisation continue to this day
• To what extant are our lives "free" under the western society.

- YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU OWN -