Marketing psychology and the hidden persuaders

August 2007
488
The Psychologist Vol 20 No 8
Marketing psychology and
the hidden persuaders
PSYCHOLOGY is put to many uses
beyond the discipline. In
marketing, these can be especially
controversial. In 1957 Vance Packard’s
Hidden Persuaders described how the
marketing industry used depth psychology
and motivational research to manipulate the
public. Chapters like ‘The psychoseduction
of children’ and ‘Self-images for
everybody’ left no doubt about Packard’s
moral contempt for marketing’s uses of
psychological techniques. The public was
duly appalled. Fifty years later, marketing’s
persuasive role is generally accepted as part
and parcel of the neo-liberal economic
agenda.
Even so, residual suspicion of
marketing’s psychological influence
remains, and not only from those repelled
by the coercive strategies of big business.
Marketing techniques are blamed for rising
childhood obesity and alcohol misuse, not
to mention cigarette-related disease, the
decline in public manners and countless
other social ills from avarice to anorexia.
The subtext of this criticism is that
marketing’s effect is psychological because
it influences people to do things that harm
themselves and others.
Some suspicions about the
psychological influence of marketing are
unjustified. For example, many consumers
express a belief in ‘subliminal’ advertising
effects, though there is no evidence that
promotions flashed on the TV screen for
less than 1/16 of a second either occur
(OfCom rules forbid them) or could be
effective in directing behaviour. Other
criticisms are taken very seriously. For
example, the UK Advertising Standards
Authority recently banned a series of
Smirnoff Vodka ads featuring a quirky
character called Uri because, in their
opinion, his ‘disregard for authority and
socially acceptable adult behaviour’ would
make Uri a ‘cult figure’ with under 18s,
breaching the revised code of practice on
alcohol advertising. This kind of argument
seems to rest on an implicit theory of social
group influence.
In this article I want to offer a personal
point of view on the uses of psychology in
marketing. I feel that these are not
necessarily shameless, spurious or
sensational. In fact, I will suggest that the
influence of psychology can enable a more
thorough critical engagement with
marketing practices.
The science of consumer
control?
Many social scientists have little time for
the instrumentalism and intellectual
shallowness they see in management
research. And marketing is, of course,
guilty as charged. One particularly galling
example is the way Abraham Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs is invoked in most
standard marketing text books to imply that
brand consumption is a natural and
inevitable expression of human drives.
These texts neglect to mention the
humanist agenda which drove Maslow’s
work and made his hierarchy more suitable
as a rationale for less, rather than more,
consumption.
The way marketing has used
psychology to beef up its claims has even
attracted critical comment from some
marketing academics themselves (e.g.
O’Shaughnessy, 1997). Others have
pursued a rigorously psychological
research agenda in marketing (Foxall,
1997, 2000). There is a dedicated academic
journal, Psychology and Marketing
(published by Wiley), which pursues the
cross-disciplinary agenda; and a few others
such as the Journal of Economic
Psychology (Elsevier). Nevertheless, it is
fair to say that the bulk of published
research in marketing makes little explicit
use of psychological theory.
The nearest thing to an exception is
advertising. Ad agencies have pursued an
active interest in psychology since J.B
Watson applied his behaviourist theories to
a very successful career with J. Walter
Thompson. Today, surveys and experiments
are often used to ‘copy test’ audience recall
or to measure attitudes in response to
creative executions. The pseudoscience of
‘psychographics’ was invented on Madison
Avenue. It’s a technique of categorising
consumers according to their ‘values and
lifestyles’, the better to exploit their deep
motivations. Tests of physiological
response to ads are not unknown, with adwatching
consumers wired in to
tachistoscopes or psychogalvanometers.
There is currently a buzz around the idea of
‘neuromarketing’, the use of MRI scanners
to isolate activity in brain receptors on
exposure to marketing stimuli.
Yet the general picture of the use of
psychology in academic marketing is
bleak. It tends to be invoked to present
marketing as a (positivistic) science of
consumer control. But, after over 100 years
of research in marketing and consumer
science, debate still rages on how, or if,
advertising ‘works’; failed products are as
common as ever, and angry customers still
throng ‘customer service’ departments.
Most top-tier marketing and advertising
journals look, at a glance, like light reading
for physicists, with their elaborate
cause–effect models and experimental
reporting style. These articles claim to
reflect the agenda of management, yet it is
a remarkable manager indeed who has ever
read one.
A different approach
Packard assumed that the ‘hidden
persuaders’ were successful, and his legacy
continues to this day. The latest craze for
hugely expensive ‘neuro-marketing’
initiatives indicates the need corporates
have to pursue a scientific agenda of
consumer control. Yet for me, Packard’s
CHRIS HACKLEY feels that a modern understanding of
the psychology involved in marketing can help us to
critically engage with it.
WEBLINKS
Advertising Standards Authority:
www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/public/
ESRC alcohol and identity research project:
www.identities.org.uk
Using psychology for marketing strategy:
www.marketingpsychology.com
Weblog: www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog
vision of marketing manipulation isn’t
plausible on an individual level. The
science of consumer control simply isn’t
advanced enough to have such an effect.
Perhaps research that looks inside our
heads for marketing’s effects only finds
half the answer.
Perhaps it is work from outside the
mainstream, deploying psychology in
pursuit of a more critical agenda in
marketing and consumer research, which
should complete the picture. For example,
in the 1980s a small but influential body of
work began to challenge the dominant
economic model of the ‘rational’ consumer
by adapting experiential, existential and
humanistic psychology to explore
consumer fantasies, hedonism and
emotionality (Hirschman, 1986;
Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982;
Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982).
Since then, other work has built
on this ‘interpretive turn’ in
marketing and consumer
research (Holbrook &
O’Shaughnessy, 1988)
exploring, for example,
consumer irrationality (Elliott,
1997) and the ways in which
brands act as symbolic
resources for the production of
social identity (Elliott &
Wattanasuwan, 1998).
My own uses of psychology
in my research lean toward
these traditions. While teaching
business I studied Open
University modules for my BPS
conversion diploma. From this I
learned Margi Wetherell and Jonathan
Potter’s discourse analysis (Potter &
Wetherell, 1987). I used my take on it in
my PhD research to look at the creative
advertising process in top London
advertising agencies (described in Hackley,
2000). I couldn’t get to grips with previous
research which positioned creativity as a
set of traits and located it inside the head of
one individual. It felt more intellectually
satisfying to look at this in terms of the
language and symbolism arising from an
interactional context. After all, advertising
tends to be collaborative rather than
individual: creative partners working on a
brief will still be influenced by the
opinions of account planners, clients,
senior executives, the consumers and
others.
In recent years more discourse-based
critical approaches have emerged in the
marketing literature (e.g. Brownlie et al.,
1999). I have drawn on the psychology of
rhetoric and ideology (e.g. in Billig, 1987,
1991) to try to show how popular
marketing texts themselves act as
ideological conduits in the field (Hackley,
2003). I have also looked critically at the
way ad agencies use qualitative research
(Hackley, 2002). Work in this vein suggests
that the influence of marketing lies not
only in its ability to draw on massive
resources to control consumers with
behavioural science. Its also has a more
subtle role as an ideological apparatus,
normalising expressive consumption and
mobilised in the language and discourse of
management education and marketing
practice. In fact, I would suggest that
marketing’s influence is more powerfully
explained by exploring its ideological
character than by conducting experiments
to see whether some people prefer blue
socks or red ones.
Some current projects
Positivistic approaches still dominate
research in marketing but far more
interesting, to me at least, are consumer
culture-based studies which investigate the
ways in which marketing practices frame
our lives, goals and senses of identity. One
of my PhD students, Norman Peng, is
studying viewers’ responses to political
advertisements (singled out for criticism by
Packard). Another, Amy Tiwsakul, has
used depth interviews, focus groups and
auto-ethnographies to explore young
consumers’ engagement with product
placement on TV (Tiwsakul et al., 2005).
This is the kind of marketing practice often
described (inaccurately) as ‘subliminal’
because viewers are seldom consciously
aware that a brand appearing in the script
or scene of a TV show (or computer game,
novel or movie) has been strategically
placed for commercial ends. Indeed,
cognitive research has suggested that
people don’t really notice placements.
Brand recall and ‘intention to purchase’
scores after exposure tend to be very weak.
But viewers feel that brands add realism
and relevance and marketers are very keen
to exploit this direct route into consumer
experience (Hackley & Tiwsakul, 2006).
So what has our research approach
revealed about how people engage with
product placement? It transpires that young
consumers draw on their knowledge of
TV product placements as a resource in
self-positioning discourses (Tiwsakul &
Hackley, in press) in much the same
way as they use conventional
advertising (O’Donohoe, 1997; Ritson
& Elliott, 1999). In other words, young
consumers draw on advertising for cues
about displaying and affirming their
senses of identity. For example, Ritson
and Elliott (1999) conducted an
ethnographic study in British schools
which revealed how important
advertisements were to adolescents as
conversational gambits. Talking about
the funniest or cleverest ads was a way
of displaying personal values and group
membership. In this sense the ads a
person thought were cool helped to
define their social positioning.
This use of advertising is not
necessarily connected to consumption of
brands – rather, it is about the consumption
of brand advertising. A discourse-inspired
psychological approach reveals that
advertisements are an important form of
social communication quite apart from
their role in selling stuff.
Our qualitative research has also
suggested that placements within the
dramatic context of a TV show resonate
with young viewers’ experience and can
access episodic memory, kicking in when
the viewer recreates the experience
portrayed in the TV drama. For example,
one respondent claimed that she recalled a
product placement for the Dairy Queen ice
cream parlour (a well-known brand in
Asia) only when she walked past the store
on her local high street. A lot of cognitive
research in this field assumes that semantic
memory holds the key to predicting
August 2007
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Psychology and marketing
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consumer behaviour – if a brand is recalled
after exposure to a marketing stimulus,
maybe it will be bought. No one has yet
tried to test the extent to which the
dramatic realism of entertainment
programming creates cues for episodic
recall, probably because it is hard to fit
such a construct as episodic memory into
the experimental paradigm.
The effect of product
placement can also be partly
explained through the
ideological notion of
‘normalisation’. Placement
effects may be partly a
matter of recall, but more
importantly, putting brands
in entertainment normalises
them as inevitable
accessories to everyday
social life.
Another exciting project
I am involved with that combines
psychological investigation and marketing
is called Branded Consumption and
Identification: Young People and Alcohol.
It is funded by the ESRC under the
Identities and Social Action theme
(www.identities.org.uk) and led by Chris
Griffin, Professor of Psychology at the
University of Bath. The project team has
reviewed a vast range of alcohol brand
marketing practices in the UK and is now
well into the data-gathering phase with
focus groups, depth interviews and
fieldwork around the social life and
drinking practices of young people in three
UK regions. The project is topical, given
the current moral panic about ‘binge’
drinking. Some of the criticism of alcohol
marketing seems fuelled by the overtly
sexualised and gendered advertisements
that were seen before the recent regulatory
clampdown.
Our initial readings of the data sets
suggest that branded alcohol has a role in
orienting and adding nuance to young
people’s discourses of ‘going out’. The
drinking stories of friendship and hi-jinks
are often engaging and sometimes
colourful (‘eyeballing’ and ‘funnelling’ are
two drinking games you won’t see in polite
salons). But, above all, they are social.
Alcohol brands, along with clubs, music
and fashion constitute a discursive
landscape which
young people seem
to draw on in
complex ways to
perform social
competence and
accomplish identity
positioning
strategies.
Sensational
headlines mask a
cultural
phenomenon in
which marketing is deeply implicated.
But, however amoral marketing practice
may be, simple cause and effect cannot
easily be assigned, and the moral high
ground is already too crowded to
accommodate all the marketing critics.
Seen through a sociological social
psychological lens, marketing wields a
powerful influence within a richly
symbolic interactional context. Marketed
brands nuance the meaning of everyday
interaction. For drama buffs, life is a stage:
but for marketers, it’s a product placement
opportunity.
Potent partners?
Vance Packard’s disapproval of marketing’s
psychological influence would receive a
ready hearing were it published in 2007. If
anything, our suspicion of marketers has
deepened even as our obsession with
brands has grown. You may think that
marketers contribute to this negative PR by
making overblown claims about our
techniques – I couldn’t possibly comment.
But is seems clear that psychology and
marketing make potent partners. If
academics widen our perspective to take in
the sociological social psychology of
marketing we might demystify it and its
practitioners just a little, and perhaps at the
same time offer a more telling critique of
its unintended or marginal effects.
■ Chris Hackley is Professor of
Marketing in the School of Management,
Royal Holloway University of London.
E-mail: chris.hackley@rhul.ac.uk.
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DISCUSS AND DEBATE
Is the integrity of the discipline compromised by
psychology’s involvement in marketing and
advertising?
Does Packard’s vision still have relevance given the
alleged sophistication of modern consumers?
Should psychology play a greater role in advertising
regulation and public policy?
Have your say on these or other issues this article
raises. E-mail ‘Letters’ on psychologist@bps.org.uk or
contribute (members only) via www.psychforum.org.uk.
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