Ernest Dichter

Who was Ernest Dichter?

Ernest Dichter was an Austrian-American psychologist and marketing expert known as the "father of motivational research." Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Ideas he established were a significant influence on the practices of the advertising industry in the twentieth century. Dichter promised the "mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer". As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas. According to a New York Times article in 1998, he "was the first to coin the term focus group and to stress the importance of image and persuasion in advertising". In Vance Packard's book on Dichter and his practices, he recalls meeting Dichter in his castle and finding children watching televisions while resident psychologists, crouching behind special screens secretly filmed and studied their every action so that they could inform advertisers how to manipulate their unconscious minds. Dicter called such focus groups his "living laboratory" : one such session led to the invention of the Barbie Doll: "What they wanted was someone sexy looking, someone that they wanted to grow up to be like," Dichter reported, "Long legs, big breasts, glamorous. " To Packard, Dichter's gothic mansion was a sinister factory that manufactured and implanted self-destructive desires.