What all these techniques – propaganda, advertising and so on – have in common is that they appeal to our emotions. We like to think we are rational creatures who weigh up issues and come to a considered opinion. Advertisers are well aware that this is an illusion. Louis Cheskin, the head of a Chicago research firm in the 1950s which carried out studies for merchandisers, said:
Motivation research is the type of research that seeks to learn what motivates people in making choices. It employs techniques designed to reach the unconscious or subconscious mind because preferences generally are determined by factors of which the individual is not conscious. Actually in the buying situation the consumer generally acts emotionally and compulsively, unconsciously reacting to the images and designs which in the subconscious are associated with the product.
What Cheskin is saying is that advertising is not just about remembering the brand name. An advertiser would put nothing more than a brand name on a poster or screen, without any imagery or other peripheral effects, only if he was trying to appeal to an educated sector of society who would say to themselves: ‘We don't need all that hype.’ This pleasant feeling of self-importance would then become associated with the product. So even this kind of advertising uses the same technique of appealing to our unconscious motivations. We want to feel sophisticated and witty, and we are led to believe that drinking a certain brand of coffee will help us to do so. This same brand of coffee is advertised with background music dating from the halcyon days of our youth. And so on: it is obvious how it goes, but its obviousness does not stop it from being a potent force, just as a lightly hypnotized subject is in the ambiguous position of seeing through the operator's suggestions, but going along with them anyway.
Advertisers well know how to tweak our subconscious motivations, our vulnerabilities and hidden insecurities, to get us to buy their clients’ products. Even children are regarded as ‘consumer trainees’, and therefore as legitimate targets of advertising campaigns. They have to aim for the subconscious, because surveys show time and again that we don't know our conscious minds, or even that we lie. For instance, a brewery asked consumers which of their products they preferred, the light beer or the regular beer. The reply was overwhelming support for the light beer – despite the fact that the brewery sold nine times as much of the regular beer. In another survey, people were asked whether they liked kippers, and most people said that they didn't – but then it turned out that over a third of the people in the survey had never tasted a kipper.
A practical reason why manufacturers from the 1950s onwards had to find more powerful ways of advertising was simply that they had the means, with increasing automation, of massive overproduction. They therefore had to generate what euphemistically came to be called ‘psychological obsolescence’, which is to say that they had to persuade the public that last year's product was not what they really wanted, as compared with this year's, whether or not last year's was in fact ready for the dustbin. But we are not so stupid. At a conscious level we would protest this Machiavellian manoeuvre. So advertisers bypass our conscious thinking.
Another reason was increasing standardization. Advertisers have to try to make their product stand out, because otherwise it wouldn't. In the old days, when every shopkeeper made his own goods or foodstuffs, there were presumably noticeable differences in quality and character. Nowadays, there is hardly any difference between buying the product of one manufacturer or another, except presentation and packaging. And so advertisers have to work hard to make such a difference in our minds. That the difference doesn't exist in reality is clear. Blindfold people and ask them to tell which is the brand of cigarettes or soft drink they always ask for in the shops, and they fail miserably. But if the shopkeeper is out of their particular brand, they get upset. Clearly, advertising has touched some emotional point inside them. Modern marketers such as Scott Bed-bury talk of ‘emotional leverage’: ‘Nike, for example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with sports and fitness. With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people's lives, and that's our opportunity for emotional leverage.’
Repetition has been a feature of advertisements since their inception in a recognizably modern form in the nineteenth century. It is a proven way of bypassing our critical faculties and appealing to the emotions. There are other methods, such as an appeal to authority (remember the men in white coats looking serious in a toothpaste laboratory?), or making us feel that we are not in with the in-crowd if we don't drink a particular drink, but repetition is simple and effective. But at a deeper level all advertising – probably all propaganda – follows the same threefold pattern. First, you have to gain someone's interest (‘Wow! She's gorgeous!’). Then you have to make an emotional appeal (‘I'd like to belong to the kind of group where such gorgeous women hang out’). Finally, you have to offer some way for the victim to resolve the conflict (‘If I drink that brand of cocktail, I'll belong to the group’).
From every point of view, then, it looks as though advertisers employ subliminal manipulation. They do not target our conscious minds, but our unconscious minds.
Subliminal Messaging
The most notorious attempt by advertisers to manipulate an audience was the use of subliminal messaging. Here is how bestselling author Vance Packard blew the lid off that particular game:
The London Sunday Times front-paged a report in mid-1956 that certain United States advertisers were experimenting with ‘subthreshold effects’ in seeking to insinuate sales messages to people past their conscious guard. It cited the case of a cinema in New Jersey that it said was flashing ice-cream ads onto the screen during regular showings of film. These flashes of message were split-second, too short for people in the audience to recognize them consciously but still long enough to be absorbed unconsciously.
A result, it reported, was a clear and otherwise unaccountable boost in ice-cream sales. ‘Subthreshold effects, both in vision and sound, have been known for some years to experimental psychologists,’ the paper explained. It speculated that political indoctrination might be possible without the subject being conscious of any influence being brought to bear on him.
It should be added that this was a carefully controlled experiment. On some evenings, the subliminal messages were not flashed on the screen, and on those evenings ice-cream sales did not go up. At much the same time as these experiments in advertising, it was reported that Playboy magazine had been conducting its own experiments in subliminal messaging, by printing the word ‘sex’ too small for the eye consciously to detect, to stimulate sales.
Not all subliminal messaging is as provocative as the Gilbey's Gin advertisement with which Wilson Bryan Key begins his book Subliminal Seduction, which provided, on analysis, about a dozen clues suggesting relaxation after a sex orgy, starting with the word ‘sex’ half visible on ice cubes in the glass of gin. Nor is all of it as obvious, even when analysed and pointed out; in fact, you might think that Key and his like at times read too much into things, like the story of the man who tells a suggestive joke, and when his audience sniggers accuses them of having the dirty minds, not him. Admen themselves have had a laugh at Key's expense: Absolut Vodka's 1990 campaign displayed a glass of vodka on the rocks with the word ‘Absolut’ on the ice cubes. But there is no doubt in my mind that advertisers do employ subliminal techniques – that for all the scandal about subliminal advertising that followed the publication of Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders in 1957, we are still constantly being bombarded by such messages, especially by advertisers.
In the 1950s, as we will see before long, fear of brainwashing was in everyone's minds. This fear became attached to subliminal messaging, as if we could be compelled to act on a subliminally received suggestion without knowing why and even against our wills. But there is no evidence that we are compelled to act on a subliminal suggestion. It may, of course, incline us in a certain direction, as all advertising does; but it doesn't compel. And that, ess
entially, is why the advertising industry stopped making use of subliminal messaging: the public found it offensive, and it was no more effective than other, less offensive methods. A lot of people think that subliminal messaging was banned by legislation, but that is not true. The advertising industry made a decision not to use such crude forms of subliminal messaging. It hasn't stopped them using more subtle methods, however.
A good example of subliminal perception is body language. You can meet a man, and on the surface he might be perfectly polite and charming, yet you come away from the meeting certain that he doesn't like you. In all probability you unconsciously or subliminally (below the threshold of consciousness) took in the message his body language was giving you. He may have tilted his body slightly away from you, crossed his legs with the upper foot pointing away from you – that kind of thing. Instinctively, you picked up his aversion.
In other words, there is more to subliminal perception than receiving messages flashed on to a screen. Most of it is obvious and well known: a glamorous couple use a product in an advertisement, suggesting that we will be invested with glamour if we use the product, or that we will find love, sex and other forms of fulfilment. But the fact that it is obvious doesn't make it any the less effective. And in any case, not all of it is obvious: the next time you watch TV adverts, try not to focus on the main characters and the action, which is where the director wants you to direct your conscious attention. Try to see what is happening in the background, which is what we take in unconsciously. Where is that character's gaze directed? (At her breasts.) Why is the scene set in a party? (Because the advertiser wants to appeal to your desire to belong.) Wilson Bryan Key makes the basic point:
In advertising recall studies, for example, advertisements are rarely or never recalled by the conscious mind. Any ad that can be recalled by a significant number of readers is of doubtful value. The conscious mind values, differentiates, and makes judgements. Conscious ad recall can subject an ad to critical judgement – the last thing to which any advertiser wants to expose his product. Ads are designed to implant themselves within the unconscious where they will lie dormant uncriticized, unevaluated, and unknown to the individual until the time a purchase decision is required. The buried information then surfaces as a favorable attitudinal predisposition.
As long as the snobbery and feelings of inferiority to which advertisers appeal are unconscious (as of course they are, until pointed out), advertising is working subliminally. Magazine ads and roadside hoardings (except those at busy crossroads) are designed to make an impact in no more than one or two seconds, as you flick idly through the pages or roar past at speed, probably in a hypnoidal state; there is no time for conscious evaluation.
Advertising is clearly not the same as hypnosis, but it works on some of the same features of the human constitution as hypnosis, above all our suggestibility. ‘Media has the proven, completely established ability to program human behavior much in the same way as hypnosis,’ says Key. Many writers on the subject use hypnosis as their model to express their fears about how subliminal manipulation might work: it is like someone who has been hypnotized acting on a post-hypnotic suggestion. And to a certain extent the analogy is true: advertising is a form of mind control. As with hypnosis, you can resist it, but since you are passive, in a state of mental lethargy, you are less inclined to resist it. Advertising is in a sense more pernicious than hypnosis because we choose to enter a hypnotic situation, but we have little choice in the advertisements we see and hear.
Hypnotic Sales Techniques
If you're worried about hypnosis, here is something that will make you pause before letting a salesman get his foot in your door. In Chapter 10 I outlined some of the hypnotic methods of Milton Erickson. They are subtle; they find ways around people's resistance. They have been a boon to salespeople.
There are books which claim that all successful salespeople use ‘gentle forms of conversational hypnosis’. Since everyone agrees that a hypnotized person is in an increased state of suggestibility, the idea is that through ‘conversational hypnosis’ – talking to the target person in a particular way – you play on his suggestibility. The technique is roughly as follows. You set up expectations (‘You're going to love what this washing powder can do!’); enthusiasm and genuine sincerity are helpful at this stage. It's not just mechanical: you are establishing what in the nineteenth century used to be called rapport or trust with your ‘prospect’ (as salespeople call a potential customer). Mirroring his body language is said to help at this stage. Discreetly emphasizing certain words (e.g. ‘love’ in the example above) embeds them in the customer's unconscious and guides his thinking. Indirect suggestions help: rather than suggesting straight out that he buy the product, you ask him whether he's satisfied with the whiteness of his current wash. The result is that the customer ends up thinking: ‘I wasn't sold this product. It was my idea.’
Other selling techniques are also closely related to hypnosis. They include visualization (getting the customer to picture himself at the wheel of that new car, perhaps with a beautiful blonde sitting next to him), suggesting that he cannot remember details of the opposition's product and so inducing a kind of amnesia, and manipulating his emotions, for example by making him feel guilt for missed opportunities in the past so that he doesn't want to miss this golden opportunity you're offering him. They even go so far as to plant the equivalent of post-hypnotic suggestions: ‘I'm sure that tonight, as you lie in bed, you're going to think about how nice it would be to have a new BMW.’
All these techniques and more are claimed to be effective and probably are. Nor does there seem to be any good reason to deny them the name of hypnosis. It is just an application of Ericksonian techniques to selling. Salespeople learn the techniques and sprinkle key words and tones of voice and body language into their pitch, until the ‘prospect’ is effectively in a light trance. They use stories to win the customer's confidence, name-dropping like mad because famous names help to win confidence. They ask all the right questions, direct the conversations with hidden commands and so on – whatever it takes to sell the product and pocket the commission. They find the indirect, Ericksonian approach far better than hard selling: ‘Most people find that our product is the best … Have you ever wanted freedom from annoying paperwork? Now is the time to improve your working life.’ Keep it vague, leave it up to the prospect to imagine exactly how his life will improve.
Ericksonian hypnotherapy empowers the patient by making the choice to get well effectively up to him. Pseudo-Ericksonian selling parodies this by having the customer think the choice is up to him. But don't worry. One of the themes of this book is that even in full-fledged hypnosis you can't be made to do anything you don't really want to do. So no salesman using quasi-hypnotic techniques is going to dupe you into spending vast amounts of money when you don't want to. The choice really is up to you.
The Charisma of Tyrants
One of the less tangible results of the Second World War was a widespread fear of charisma. Hitler had entranced an entire nation. This fear lasted a long time. I have long held a private theory that John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the two most charismatic speakers of the post-war decades, were assassinated, in the broad view, because the American people were not yet ready for the re-emergence of charisma. And one of the rebellions of the next generation of young people was to attach themselves in large quantities to charismatic icons, and ultimately to gurus wielding mystical power and often leading new cults.
How do such leaders entrance us? One of the best analyses of tyrannical power came from the pen of Austrian novelist Hermann Broch (1886–1951), who was imprisoned by the Nazis until influential friends such as James Joyce and Thomas Mann obtained his release. For all the brilliance of his work, he died in poverty. In his book The Spell Marius Tatti is a true tyrant – that is, he is convinced he knows what's best for others. Marius is a Luddite, opposed to radios, threshing machines and so on; he is also a fake earth and natu
re-mother mystic, as opposed in the book to the true mysticism and insight of Mother Gisson. The village in which he arrives as a crippled Italian vagabond is a microcosm of Germany in the 1930s under Hitler. He gradually convinces the villagers, or a large proportion of them, that he has come to redeem them. Wentzel, another wanderer who becomes his chief sidekick, says at one point: ‘He only speaks out loud what the others are thinking.’ That is the secret of his success: he makes it seem as though he is not imposing anything on anyone, but only allowing them to express their essential selves and beliefs. His power comes from his eloquence and from the fact that, although he is crazy, he believes totally in himself and his insane ideas. His power is expressly likened to mesmerism: there is a scene in which Irmgard, an innocent village girl, is so entranced by Marius (with whom she believes herself to be in love) that she allows herself to be set up by him as a sacrifice to the earth spirits of the mountain which looms over the village and colours all their thinking. Tragically, this sacrifice later literally takes place, once Marius has whipped up the villagers by the power of dance and ritual theatre into a state of mass hypnosis.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 45