There are four big forces that have played a critical role in manipulating and feeding hyper-consumption: the power of persuasion; the buy now, pay later culture; the law of life cycles; and the ‘just one more’ factor. These forces offer some way of making sense of why we consume at the rate and in the way we do and help answer the question: How did we end up with so much stuff?
Power of Persuasion
In 1917, twenty-six-year-old Edward Bernays went to work for President Woodrow Wilson. His first job was to help form the Committee on Public Information alongside renowned political journalists Walter Lippmann and George Creel. By this time, the word ‘propaganda’ was gaining a sinister connotation in the West due to its association with communism, so Bernays coined the term ‘public relations’ as a positive alternative. The committee crafted the irresistibly patriotic slogan ‘Making the World Safe for Democracy’ to influence gun-shy America into an anti-German frenzy to go ‘over there’ and fight in World War I. They used newsprint, posters, radio, telegraph, cable and films to broadcast this message.
After the war, Bernays, like many PR political gurus of that time, went to Madison Avenue, where he applied his talent for influencing the masses to the nascent advertising industry. He received a letter from his uncle Sigmund Freud asking for money. ‘I disdain to ask you for this favour, but times are hard in Austria and my research thus far has not been well received. Is there a way I might borrow from you a sum to help cover some recent expenses?’ Freud wrote.
Bernays, knowing his uncle was fond of cigars, enclosed a box of Cubans along with the cheque. Grateful for the loan and the gift, Freud sent Bernays a copy of his unpublished book, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Within his uncle’s writing, Bernays found the scientific backing for his ideas about the power of emotions to persuade. The book reinforced his profound belief that you could manipulate consumers’ behaviour by connecting with them on a deep subconscious level, particularly their drives towards aggressiveness and sexuality. To get people to want stuff, desire should be linked to rudimentary human patterns – what we admire, what we despise, what we love, and what we hate and fear.4 He was so impressed, in fact, that he arranged for his uncle’s book to be published in America. Freud became famous, and to a lesser degree, so did Bernays as the father of spin.
Bernays understood the power of psychology to design effective public marketing campaigns. ‘If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?’ Bernays wrote.5 He reasoned that if he could tap into people’s desire to feel good, powerful and sexy, he could sell just about anything, and he proudly referred to this concept as the ‘engineering of consent’. We call it the power of persuasion. From soap to silk to bacon to even Wall Street stocks, Bernays got consumers to buy not what they needed but what they desired, connecting not just to who the consumer is but who he or she wanted to be. He realized that the power in this principle was that unmet desires have no fixed point. One of his favourite techniques for influencing consumer wants was to use indirect third-party endorsements. ‘If you can influence the leaders,’ he posited, ‘either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.’ Through techniques such as these, he didn’t just change what people bought; he transformed time-honoured social habits.
In the mid-1920s, despite the widespread popularity of cigarettes, it was not considered acceptable for ladies to smoke in public. The American Tobacco Company hired Bernays to change this social norm. He realized that the real desire for women was not the cigarettes themselves but the liberty to pursue the same things as men. During the 1929 New York Easter Parade, he arranged for a group of attractive young debutantes, including his own secretary, Bertha Hunt, to march in their Sunday best. On Bernays’s signal, the women all lit up a Lucky Strike cigarette. Hunt’s press release described the march as ‘Lighting the Torches of Freedom’ in the interests of gender equality. And being the master of PR, Bernays saw to it that the media throughout the world covered the event. The idea was that anyone against the idea of women smoking would appear to be against their liberty and freedom. Although this did not completely do away with the taboo against women’s smoking, the number of women taking up smoking skyrocketed (American Tobacco’s revenues jumped by $32 million in 1928 alone).6 In his memoirs, Bernays wrote, ‘It was on this day I learned that age-old customs could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of media.’7
When you consider that the average person sees more than three thousand advertising messages per day, it is not surprising that we have become so seduced by the pull of the new and the desire for more.8 Influencers such as Bernays were part of a wider force, which engineered and reinforced a system that converted consumers’ wants into needs into everyday habits.
The Diderot Effect
In 1919, an advertisement from the department store Sears exhorted, ‘Use your electricity for more than light.’ Before World War I, the average household did not have an electric toaster, blender or dishwasher, or electronic waste disposal. Families used other means, even if it took a bit longer to toast a piece of bread or wash the dishes. The consumer revolution had barely begun, yet we learned to need and depend on these gadgets. Few people today will deny that these products make our lives easier, and most of us use them every day. But around the same time, superfluous gadgets also entered the kitchen, such as the spiral slicer and other garnishing tools as specific as melon ball scoopers. If you have ever created dramatic spiral strands, ribbons or thin slices from vegetables such as a cucumber, you have probably used a spiral slicer. Advertisers not only touted the slicer as the ‘clever, easy and sophisticated way’ to add colour to meat platters and to make bland one-colour vegetables such as carrots ‘more attractive’, but also pulled out the health card, attempting to convince mothers that fancy slicing was the way to get their children to eat more vegetables. Products such as these, which could never be considered a necessity, mark the crossing of a critical line, the line of needing a new invention for rational reasons including hygiene and safety to you-never-know-when-you-might-need-it reasons devised by advertisers.
When you think that garnishing tools were introduced about ninety years ago, it starts to make more sense how kitchens today became stuffed with items such as ice cream machines, bread makers, mushroom brushes, chocolate fondue fountains, popcorn makers, iced tea brewers and strawberry slicers. Most of us buy these contraptions on impulse, possibly learn how they work, use them once, and spend time trying to find a good place to store them, until we admit that we are never going to make homemade ice cream and spend more time working out how to get rid them. In 2009, an average home in the UK contained twenty-five electrical appliances – an increase of 60 percent in just the last five years alone.9 How did we lose sight of our real needs?
In his essay ‘Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown’, eighteenth-century French writer Denis Diderot tells the story of how the gift from a friend of a beautiful scarlet dressing gown changed his home. Initially delighted by his gift, Diderot discarded his old gown that he had worn for as long as he could remember. But in a short time, his pleasure turned sour as he began to feel as though the rest of his possessions and surroundings were shabby in comparison with the new gown. One by one he replaced the familiar but well-worn furnishings of his study. He replaced his old chair, for example, with an armchair covered in Moroccan leather. And the rickety old desk? That was out, too. In came an expensive new writing table. Even the beloved prints that had hung on his walls for years were taken down to make way for newer, more costly prints that matched the elegance of the new robe. ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing gown,’ Diderot wrote, ‘but I have become a slave to my new one.’10
Today, consumer researchers call this kind of trading up the Diderot Effect. In the way that Diderot’s new smart gown had the unexpected effect of ‘forcing everything else to conform to its elegant tone’, we have been persuaded ever since the 1920s that we need complementary groups of possessions (colour, style or the up-to-dateness of an item). Ralph Lauren will take over an entire floor of Bloomingdale’s to market a self-contained universe to convince us of the need for a ‘total home environment’. Shoppers can purchase matching Ralph Lauren wallpaper, glasses, sheets,