Persuasion: Buy Your Very Own Identity!

In 1928 Edward L. Bernays wrote "Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How", about a technique for “the mass distribution of ideas” (Bernays, 57); a technique he called ‘the psychology of public persuasion.” This psychology, he argued, will “bring about changes in public opinion that will make for the acceptance of new doctrines, beliefs, and habits.” (Bernays 51)

For the majority of history, public opinion has existed as an immeasurable, intangible belief system. During this time, material or consumer purchases were a separate, removed entity unto themselves. There were advertisements promoting a particular brand of soap or cereal, but they mainly relied on facts, or guarantees about the product: this soap floats, that cereal contains fiber. While the advertising certainly appealed to the emotions of the public, marketers hadn’t yet begun to try to change their consumers' reason or rational behind purchasing a certain product. However, over the years, this separation has diminished so there is no longer a clear-cut line of demarcation. It appears that these industries are attempting to – and succeeding in – reassigning our value systems. As prescribed by Bernays and emphasized in “The Persuaders”, advertising or manipulating of public opinion goes far beyond extolling the “virtues” of a brand’s performance. It extols the “virtues” you gain by buying the brand. If you’re not attaining peace of mind from a religious service, why not buy it? Persuaders today are marketing geniuses that run psychological tests on us to sell us our morals, values, and ideologies. They appeal to the deficits we now find in our lives, and attempt to fill them with goods. Persuaders teach us to assign personal value to items, they encourage us to think about products in such a way that we come to associate them with a particular lifestyle. Advertising today doesn’t focus on the product, it focuses on the lifestyle one leads because of the product, or the lifestyle one could have if they purchased the product.

One of the most blatant examples is the clothing company Abercrombie and Fitch. They appeal to the social aspirations of a particular society – high school and college age kids. The company’s effective strategy requires its employees to sell the “lifestyle” instead of the clothing. The associates were (at one point) encouraged to ignore the customers and to act as though they were “better” than them; the catalogue emphasizes a life of ease, good looks, and hedonism. This produces the idea that, by wearing Abercrombie and Fitch, one can attain popularity and coolness. Certain products have evolved to come to stand for a specific sense of worth- in the sense of an intangible value; there's a by-product of consumerism hidden within the questions of self-identity and exterior-identity.

Perhaps this identity crisis springs from a new movement in cultural identity: America was once the “melting pot” of the world. People came here from far-flung places and were expected to drop their old identity and assume a new “American” one. Now, schools and organizations celebrate diversity. It’s the politically correct thing to do, but it’s also considered the “cool” thing to do. Read any magazine aimed at teenager girls and young women; one of the most repeated mantras is: “be an individual; show the world who you really are; be yourself and boys will like you.” And yet, these aphorisms are sandwiched between articles on the latest trends; it’s almost a catch – 22: you can’t be an individual without doing what everyone else agrees is cool.

Bernays equated public relations to "the shaping of reality itself ". In reality, people still want the same things they always wanted, advertisers are now simply distributing goods in a different way, and telling the public they want them for a different reason. It’s the system of delivering them, their framework, and the reason for delivering them that has changed.
And so as Bernays’ work continues to become more refined and more insidious, the public may find they no longer have any control over the decisions they believe they make; somewhere out there, a reseacher has tapped into his primal desires to influence his purchase.