The basic premise behind marketing is that as companies invest more time and resources in understanding the needs, problems, interests, tastes and motivations of their potential buyers, they increase their chances of connecting with them and achieving successful sales.
On a day like today but in 1865, Sigmund Freud was born , who in some way, dedicated himself to the task of understanding what is behind certain human behaviors and thoughts, and what are the factors that cause them.
His theory of psychoanalysis not only became an important discovery for psychology, but also for the emergence of advertising, marketing and consumer societies as we know them today.
Below, we invite you to learn how psychoanalysis served as a theoretical basis for the development of marketing and how it was first put into practice in the mid-20th century in the American population, mainly for political purposes:
Brief explanation of the foundations of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian physician and neurologist who became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century thanks to his theory of psychoanalysis and all the theoretical foundations that derived from it.
Psychoanalysis is a psychological current that aims to treat mental illnesses that, for some reason, affect the academic, work and love performance that a person may have in their daily life .
To this end, this author attempted to explain human behavior based on the analysis of unconscious sexual conflicts that originate in childhood.
One of Freud's great discoveries is that instinctive impulses, which are repressed by consciousness, are not completely discarded from the mind, on the contrary they remain in the unconscious.
In the unconscious (psychic instance of the “Id”), our fears, dreams, repressed desires, sexual impulses, primitive and irrational forces are stored.
Thus, through free association and dream interpretation, psychoanalysts could move all those repressed thoughts, feelings and desires from the subconscious to the conscious (metaphorically meaning moving what is in the depths of the ocean to the surface) and thus, “permanently cure” the mental discontinuities that these people presented.
The historical context where this theory was developed
Although Sigmund Freud began publishing his theories of psychoanalysis in 1930, it was not until after his death, thanks to the efforts of his daughter Anna Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays , that this psychological current began to acquire great importance in the United States and the entire world.
The influence of his theories began to grow in the years following the Second World War, when, as a result of war trauma, many people, including soldiers, needed to seek psychological therapy to improve their mental health.
In these therapies, it was shown that wars were a space where people released those primitive and irrational forces that they repressed in their unconscious.
In this sense, for Freud the human being is not a 100% rational being but is also dominated by unconscious and irrational forces .
This is where Edward Bernays comes in , who spent his early years in the United States as a press officer. He then went on to work for the United States Committee on Public Information.
During and after World War I, Bernays became a spokesman for the peace and democracy speeches promoted by President Woodrow Wilson, who became a hero to the nation for his efforts to end the war and leave the United States as a victorious country.
Today we might understand that these actions could have been the result of good political marketing , however, at the time, Bernays was surprised at how much the masses could be moved around a particular idea.
Based on the theoretical foundations of his uncle – Freud – in his work “Introduction to Psychoanalysis” published in 1917, he understands the power that political propaganda has to manipulate and mobilize the masses in times of war based on these principles of irrationality.
So the question is, how can this same logic of persuasion be used in times of peace? If propaganda clearly worked to promote war, how powerful could it be to promote peace and other unconscious desires?
It happened that the word “propaganda” had a negative connotation as it was the term used by the Germans in times of war, so Berneys sought to create another term that would encompass the same characteristics, and that is when he gave rise to the concept of “public relations”.
In the following years, Bernays created a small public relations firm in New York, whose purpose was to find a way to manage and control the way in which these new industrialized masses thought and felt.
Through his public relations agency, he showed American corporations how people could desire things they didn't need by linking consumer products to their unconscious desires .
This represented a great stimulus for the emergence of consumer societies which, today, use digital platforms and social networks to connect with brands and acquire products and/or services available on the market.
Edward Bernays and psychoanalysis applied to the masses
After Edward Bernays decided to apply these theoretical foundations to his business objectives, and to his new purposes within this new public relations industry, multiple American brands began to turn to him to boost their sales, such as the American Tobacco Corporation led by George Hill.
Hill went to Bernays worried that cigarette sales were not growing as he felt he was losing half the market because men had imposed a taboo on women smoking in public.
As a strategy to boost cigarette sales among the female audience, Bernays sought help from Dr. A. Brill (a renowned New York psychoanalyst) to find out, from the perspective of this psychological school, what cigarettes meant to women.
This psychoanalyst explained to Bernays that cigarettes symbolized the penis and male power. He told Bernays that if she could find a way to connect cigarettes with challenging male power, women would smoke because then they would have their “own penises” and feel powerful and independent.
So, during the traditional Thanksgiving parade in New York, Edward Bernays convinced a group of young women to march in the parade with cigarettes hidden in their clothes and, on his signal, to light them in a conspicuous manner.
Bernays told the press that a group of suffragettes were going to participate in a protest parade by lighting what she called “torches of freedom.”
So when these women started smoking in public, I had already prepared a gro telegram free number philippines up of journalists with their cameras to capture the moment with the phrase “torches of freedom,” which for the American psyche, has great meaning and automatically connects with the idea of being free.
All of Bernays' efforts paid off. As a result of this strategy, women began to buy cigarettes and sales began to grow. Bernays made it socially acceptable for women to smoke with a single symbolic act.
It was a phrase that worked in a rational sense, and at the same time, connected the unconscious with desires, making it a clear example of how psychoanalysis worked perfectly to create a need to buy .
From psychoanalysis to marketing
However, what the growth of consumer societies and the transition to marketing as we know it today achieved was that the persuasion strategies that Bernays achieved fascinated American corporations, especially because they saw in them the solution to the conditions in which they found themselves.
With the rise of the means of production, many products were created that were sold out of necessity and promoted for their functionality and practicality; but at the time there was a surplus of products that needed to be sold that were no longer as necessary.
The application of these principles of psychoanalysis was made clear by the famous statement by Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers, in which he stated that “We need to change America from a culture of needs to a culture of desires. People must be taught to desire, to want new things, even before the old things have been completely consumed.”
After analyzing these historical events, there is no doubt about the influence that psychoanalysis had on the emergence of consumer societies, advertising and marketing, since it served as a theoretical basis for creating a strategy of persuasion of products and/or services to raise the level of consumer purchasing.
Psychoanalysis helped companies connect with their potential buyers through symbols, languages, policies and communications that clicked with their deepest unconscious desires, making that person passionately crave that product and/or service.
Thanks to psychoanalysis, we learn to create that need for consumption associated with irrational impulses to acquire things that, although we do not need, deep down we desire.
For the marketing of the 60's, the individual stopped being perceived primarily as a citizen to become a consumer and, under this principle, neuromarketing strategies are developed.
Neuromarketing is an area of knowledge within marketing that is concerned with understanding the activities of the unconscious, since studies have stated that 69% of purchasing decisions, mainly within a B2C market, are made unconsciously and take around 2.5 seconds.