‘Culture’ and the limits of innovation in marketing: Ernest Dichter, motivation studies and psychoanalytic consumer research in Great Britain, 1950s–1970s

Abstract

This article studies the reception of the Austro-American market and consumer researcher Ernest Dichter and of motivation research in the United Kingdom between the early 1950s and the 1970s. Dichter became a ‘brand’ in 1950s America, where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the ‘hidden’ motivations of their consumers.When Dichter arrived in London, British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services. Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of ‘American’ brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique. In my conclusion, I relate the case of Ernest Dichter to the problem of purely cultural – not economic – barriers to innovation in marketing and the rise of a ‘guru industry’ as part of the social history of management. Farewell to the blossom and besoms of broom, farewell to the creels and the basket, the folks of today they would far sooner pay for a thing that’s been made out of plastic. The Thirty Foot Trailer (Irish Song)