System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Vance Packard – Pop Sociologist of Marketing Scams and Much More
Vance Packard burst upon the scene in 1957 with his best-selling The Hidden Persuaders, a book which is useful to contemplate, both for its revelations of the psychological manipulations used by advertisers and the rise of irony in pop culture.
The Hidden Persuaders sold over a million copies–a stunning achievement for a work of non-fiction at the time and still a pretty fair figure for pop sociology. In THP, Packard revealed that marketers had discovered myriad ways of selling that played havoc with consumers' brains.
The best way to sell a car, a tube of toothpaste, or a breakfast cereal was to appeal to consumers' anxieties and aspirations. Marlboro cigarettes were "repositioned" with advertising featuring cowboys to appeal to fantasies of freedom and masculinity. (The brand had previously been sold to women. They were red to match lipstick.) Automobile dealers drew men into showrooms with convertibles and sold them sedans on the "wife vs. mistress" theory: a racy car is attractive but a sensible car is one you want to settle down with.
That such techniques seem completely unremarkable and even banal to us today is worth remarking on, since they were perceived as dangerous 40 years ago. It is a commonplace today that advertisers are liars, a fact that advertisers exploit ruthlessly with ironic ads.
THP itself was exploited by advertisers at the time. "The Hidden Persuaders" was a slogan for a line of perfumes. Packard's next book, The Waste Makers (1959), about conspicuous consumption, was picked up by a men's clothing store: "The Waist Makers." The Status Seekers (1961) was used by a Lord Calvert whiskey ad, and "status seeking" behavior became a part of the language.
Anxiety about sales and capitalism are nothing new, were nothing new in the 1950s, but there was something breathtaking in 1957 about a book that revealed the heartrates of housewives dropping as they tottered around supermarkets in a near-trance state, loading brightly colored packages into their carts while failing to recognize their neighbors in the same aisle.
THP was Packard's biggest seller. His next few books became best-sellers as well, but subsequent books sold less well, if respectably. They were surprisingly prescient of debates that currently wrack the nation. Throughout his career Packard showed a surprising ability to stay near the crest of wave.
The Naked Society (1964) was an early alarm about the techniques corporations use to gather personal information about citizens. The Sexual Wilderness (1968) criticized evolving sexual mores and the fatherless families that resulted. In a Nation of Strangers (1972) Packard worried about the breakdown of community. Later books concerned scientific transformations of human biology with psychoactive drugs and genetic manipulation, the abandonment of children, and valorization of the ultra-rich.
Unsurprisingly, Packard got little respect from the academy. Professional sociologists downplayed his work for anecdotal tendencies and lack of statistical rigor. Charles Curran wrote: "He sprays figures, wisecracks, guesses and generalisations as lavishly as the Chinese general who baptised an army with a hosepipe." His work popularized the ideas of others, like John Kenneth Galbraith, Christopher Lasch and Thorstein Veblen.
While these criticisms are valid, Packard's books actually engaged millions of readers with important issues. His critics for the most part could not make such a claim.
Packard's vision of America was suffused with a particular version of the American Dream: family, community, individualism, hard work, etc. He believe in what is generally called "family values" today, but without the right-wing antiabortionism, pro-gun inanity, or conservative cant. It offended him that advertisers would try to promote a product with something other than the actual attributes of the product. "The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat," he sniffed. Yet he rarely proposed solutions to the societal ills he diagnosed.
There was an amusing and alarming paranoid futurism to his work. "What happens to the historic concept of the individual if surgeons can transplant heads, if biologists can double the size of the head, and if physiologists can put electrical machinery inside the head?" he asked in The People Shapers (1977). "Eventually–say by AD 2000–perhaps all this depth manipulation will seem amusingly old-fashioned," he presciently stated in THP. Perhaps, he predicted, electronic brain stimulation would be the norm. "The Christian possibility of redemption is incomprehensible to a computer." A worthy thought indeed.
He sought community and psychological integrity. "At times it is pleasanter to be non-logical," he wrote. "But I prefer being non-logical by my own free will and impulse than to find myself manipulated into such acts."
Vance Packard tried to help ordinary people understand the changes in society, what the marketers wanted them to do, what the corporations wanted to know about them, what revolutions in science might mean to their lives. He sold millions of books and changed the way Americans look at advertising. He died Dec. 12, age 82.
