Marketing is Propaganda
Propaganda is a Latin word meaning 'to spread' - essentially - 'to propagate'.
In 1622, it was originally used to describe the mission of a new
administrative body in the Catholic Church called the Congregatio de
Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith). Its activity was
aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries.
Until the 20th Century, its meaning was largely apolitical and amoral. But
thanks to Edward Bernays, the power of persuasion became an essential tool in
promoting acceptance of WWI. As Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Bernays had the
benefit of insider insights about exploiting human proclivities. WWI was not a
popular cause in the US so a government agency called the Committee on Public
Information hired Bernays to sway public opinion to support it.
Referring to his work as “psychological warfare”, Bernays’s WWI propaganda
campaign was successful beyond expectation. So, after the war he turned that
success into a new field of marketing called Public Relations, focused on producing a pivotal psychological impact. He outlined the methods behind propaganda in his aptly
named book, "Propaganda", which is still the foundational textbook of Public Relations.
Though Bernays was a professed Democrat and described his wife as a
“feminist”, he represented clients with any political and/or economic objective. His most cited persuasion campaign is the American Tobacco Company’s
effort to increase its customer base by getting women to smoke.
Its first series of ads used doctors to promote the idea that smoking
could replace eating in an effort to stay thin. Then Bernays succeeded in making lasting cultural change with “Torches of Freedom”, a staged event where a large
group of influential Feminist debutantes in the NYC 1929 Easter parade smoked cigarettes along the route.
Introduced in the 1970's as a "support statement" for Women's Lib, Virginia Slims cigarettes are an obvious example of "propaganda's" enduring power to both shape and capitalize upon social trends.
So, with that background in mind, here are the opening and defining
paragraphs of
Propaganda.
ORGANIZING CHAOS
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who
manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government
which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in
which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must
cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning
society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their
fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply
needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever
attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost
every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in
our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively
small number of persons - a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty -
who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is
they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social
forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the
orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for
whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of
the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to
themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern
political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization
and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of
candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the
shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then
we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines
should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or
four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of
private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the
abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they
would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have
voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot
the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical
proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we
accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question;
from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely
prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we
conform most of the time.
In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the
market. In practice, if everyone went around pricing, and chemically tasting
before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are
for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion,
society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its
attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and
continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy
or commodity or idea.
It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special
pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our
conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to
wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite
method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition
function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to
permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda.
Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized- the
manipulation of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by
which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the
consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public opinion is
organized and focused may be misused. But such organization and focusing are
necessary to orderly life.
As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible
government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been
invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.
With the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the
telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can be spread rapidly and even
instantaneously all over the whole of America.
H.G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these inventions when he writes in
the New York Times:
"Modern means of communication - the power afforded by print, telephone,
wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or
technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick
replies and effective discussion - have opened up a new world of political
processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the
effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The
common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal.
It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local
and sectional misunderstanding."
What Mr. Wells says of political processes is equally true of
commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity. The
groupings and affiliations of society today are no longer subject to "local and
sectional" limitations. When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of
organization was the village community, which produced the greater part of its
own necessary commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions by personal
contact and discussion among its citizens. But today, because ideas can be
instantaneously transmitted to any distance and to any number of people, this
geographical integration has been supplemented by many other kinds of grouping,
so that persons having the same ideas and interests may be associated and
regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.
It is extremely difficult to realize how many and diverse are these
cleavages in our society. They may be social, political, economical, racial,
religious or ethical, with hundreds of subdivisions of each.
