Features

February 4, 2008
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L, my article last week, I talked
about Edward Bernays and his famous
campaign that successfully persuaded
women to smoke in public. In this
article, I will talk about how that
same man helped turn America from
a ‘needs’ society to a ‘wants’ society.

In the early 1920s, America
had emerged from the First World War
rich and powerful. The corporations,
however, had a fear that there might
be an overproduction of mass goods
since the system of mass productions
had flourished during the war. At that
time, products were being advertised
to the masses on the basis of needs
and necessity. What the American
corporations realized, however, was they
would have to change the way consumers
thought about products in order to sell
the excess. One leading Wall Street
banker, Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers,

said that “we must shift America from
a ‘needs’ to a ‘desires’ culture. People
must be trained to desire; to want new
things even before the old could be
entirely consumed. We must shape a new
mentality in North

with clothes and jewellery from the other
firms he represented. He was the first
person to tell car companies that they
could most effectively sell cars to men
as a symbol of male sexuality. He also
introduced the idea

6

America. Man’s ‘What Ber nays that ordinary people
desires must be unleashed upon America should buy shares
ears ketones was a modern ideology in the stock market
by his needs. i and borrow money

T h ec thatnowinfluencesand from banks. By
corporations in North controls the masses.” doing so, he became
America, _ therefore, one of the most

used Edward Bernays to create this
mentality in the minds of the consumers.
Bernays sought to produce a new type
of customer that would buy mass-
produced goods for wants—not needs.
He invented many of the techniques of
mass consumer persuasion that we still
live with today. He was the first man to
start the practice of product placement,
dressing movie stars at film’s premieres

rich and powerful men in America.

Bernays was a man who
understood the masses in the same way
his uncle Sigmund Freud did. Moreover,
he believed that people were basically
irrational and had to be controlled by
someone else who knew what was
good for them. And the easiest way to
control irrational people was through
consumption. Consumption, he believed,

would make the irrational public happier
and thus non-violent. In his famous
book, Propaganda, Bernays writes “we
are governed, our minds modeled, our
tastes formed, and our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of.”

This story marks the start of
new era that has created the basic culture
of North American society for the past
hundred years. There is one basic reality
behind consuming: Humans get sick of
material goods. They get bored of them,
and hence they want new goods instead. .
Based on behavioural psychology,
humans are habitual animals. They have
comfort zones in which they adjust
themselves to. For many people in North
America, consuming is a comfort zone
which they are addicted to. Meanwhile,
these consumers are also _ being
bombarded daily by different messages
that try to convince them to buy ever
more products they do not need. In
addition, different organizations try their
best to show a good image of themselves
by influencing the masses from
different channels such as the media.

The point is that modern
public relations is now a very powerful
instrument. It is becoming increasingly
popular because of the role it plays in
creating and developing the so-called
“image” ofan organization. What Bernays
unleashed upon America was a modern
ideology that now influences and controls
the masses. At the age of 100, in a famous
interview, Bernays noted that nowadays,
“any person can be a public relations
practitioner.” What he really meant was
that the art of public relations, in many
cases, is now being misunderstood,
misused and, to some extent, abused
in the hands of many corporations
who use it not to benefit society, but
merely to fulfill their own self-interest.

We have been trained, for the
past hundred years, to consume. We have
been told, for the past hundred years,
that consumption will make us happy
and gives us an opportunity to become
the individuals we want to be in life. The
question is, is that really true?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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