Psychological Operations of the Consumer Culture

Psychological operations – These operations include psychological warfare and in addition encompass those political, military, economic, and ideological actions planned and conducted to create in neutral or friendly foreign groups the emotions, attitudes, or behavior to support the achievements of national objectives.

- from The Department of Defense: Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms

We still have not written the history of ideological and psychological warfare which has taken place over thousands of years. If we did, we might discover that the ideological weapons are, in most instances, even more powerful than the purely military ones. - Ernest Dichter – The Strategy of Desire

It is the capitalist organization of space into territories of consumption, extending from the display windows of urban streets to the satellite dishes in rural backyards, that is like an occupying army. A seemingly inescapable  terrain of everyday life reflecting the decisions already made by capital to transform all spaces into a ubiquitous arena of shopping and behaving according to economic commands.

Within these sites of interdiction and seduction, whether we like it or not, we are readymade consumers.   However, these occupied territories marked by the “strategies of desire” are never completely successful; we unconsciously or consciously maintain a portion of our own autonomy, pleasure, and desire.  It is whenever and wherever we slip out of the boundaries of the authorized sites of consumption into the margins, like guerrillas into our own territories, that we can begin to see market research – everything from psychographics to VALS to consumer ethnography - as forms of psychological operations and market researchers like Ernest Dichter as intelligence operatives.

Consumer research deals obsessively with the failures of the commands of the market. When the consumer acts like a guerrilla and disobeys or misrecognizes the official strategies of persuasion to believe, to consume, to vote, it is market research’s objective to find the consumer’s tactics of resistance; it is necessary for capital to obtain the necessary psychological information to launch a counter-campaign.  The consumer survey and interview then become  forms of interrogation.

There are however ruses consumers use, unconsciously or not, to hinder the surveillance of their motivations and practices. So for example in The Strategy of Desire Dichter complains about “the fetish of rationality”;

“Psychology has demonstrated that there are several permanent distortion factors which interfere with the objective observation of the motivational field. The most important one is our desire to appear rational to ourselves and to others. When confronted with an investigation of our motives we first search actively for rational explanations. The danger is great, however, that this desire to act rationally results in a rationalized answer, pseudorational cause for our behavior.”

We could say the captured consumer automatically camouflages her true feelings or motivations from the interrogator with the “fetish of rationality”. This act of dissembling for “rational explanations” interferes with the interrogator’s “objective observation”.  Dichter’s insistence on the validity of the depth interview is a direct response to this evasion; Dichter’s use of psychoanalysis in marketing research was a ruse of power to circumvent the consumer’s act of resistance.  Dichter is correct in denouncing our culture’s fetish of rationality and its repression of deeper, irrational feelings; however in the unequal power situation of market research, where researchers like Dichter attempt to trick the consumer into giving up information which ultimately will be used to seduce, manipulate, or persuade other consumers, which will be valorized and exchanged as a commodity, the fetish of rationality takes on a different meaning, it becomes, within the context of the consumer “interview” an act of opposition to the interrogator; an unconscious camouflaging technique to hide from the enemy the information he really wants.

What this military metaphor gets at is the manner in which the social sciences have been and still are more about the surveillance and control of individuals rather than the disinterested gathering of “objective” knowledge. They are an important component in the creation of strategies to integrate workers, citizens, and consumers into existing corporate, governmental and consumerist institutions and ideologies. It is the institutional use of the social sciences that transforms them into surveillance through marketing research, opinion polling and audience measurement to name a few. Within this context any innovation in the social sciences is destined to be recuperated by marketing research for the use of consumer surveillance.  Just as Taylorism and other applications of social research to industrial work discipline served to formulate the role of the industrial worker within the strict disciplinary hierarchy of the factory, so the disciplining of the American consumer demanded the marshalling of social scientists to survey and map the desires and behavior of consumers in order to engineer a consumer more appropriate to the needs of the emerging economy of mass consumption. The general movement from a society of production to a society of consumption entails the movement from forms of social control based on the factory hierarchy of command to forms based on the social surveillance of the question and the interview.  The surveillance of the consumer and the subsequent production of an informational commodity has always been at the heart of the “marketing concept” and indispensable to the smooth functioning of a society of consumption.

Tags: consumer culture, dichter, psy-ops

• December 10, 2009
• consumer culture
• 3 comments