Launched in 1955, the Marlboro Man campaign was Burnett’s most successful and among the most astonishing campaigns in the history of demand engineering. But upon the cowboy’s appearance, Marlboro went from a mere 1 percent of sales to become the fourth bestselling brand in the United States within a year; its sales increased by an astonishing 3,000 percent over that time. Burnett had not modeled the Marlboro Man on himself—he was “rumpled, pillow-shaped, balding and jowly” with “heavy horn-rimmed glasses perched on his spud-like nose.”
He also proclaimed himself adverse to psychological theory, though he did write that “the cowboy is an almost universal symbol of admired masculinity,” and perhaps he had sensed among men in the civilizing 1950s a need for reassurances on that score. In any event advertising was proving that it could project not only “reasons why” but whole mythologies; it was naturally suited to things of the spirit. If Burnett was trafficking in archetypes, he was not alone; Jungian and Freudian thought had reached the zenith of their influence, both in society and in the advertising industry, where once they had been skeptically brushed off.
If ideas of appealing to unconscious desires were once merely in the air, now an array of firms run by professional psychologists offered “motivation research,” aimed at the deepest human desires. It is hard to measure, and easy to exaggerate, how effective this analysis was; nonetheless, by 1954 there were at least eight good-sized firms offering it as a billable service. Just as in the good old days, it was under the guise of a science, until, as one reporter put it in 1959, “The difference between an ad man and a behavioral scientist became only a matter of degree.”
Among the most outspoken, highly paid, and controversial of the new commercial psychologists was Ernest Dichter —“Mr. Mass Motivations,” as he was sometimes known. A Freudian from Austria, Dichter made his name and fortune as an advisor to companies with marketing problems.
When hired by food manufacturers, he began by characterizing a product as “male” or “female” and carrying on from there. Elongated edibles like asparagus he predictably considered male. He theorized that women were uncomfortable eating wieners, being “spellbound and definitely attracted by the meats.”
Perhaps Dichter’s most famous effort was one of his first, a job he did for Chrysler. The automaker was concerned about sales of its new model, the Plymouth. Chrysler posed two questions to its corporate therapist: “1. Why do most car buyers buy the same make as their last car? 2. What influence do women have on the purchase of cars?” In response, Dichter did not really answer the questions. Instead, he wrote, “Tell me how a man drives, and I will tell you what kind of man he is.”