Freud's nephew and the origins of public relations (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Freud's nephew and the origins of public relations (2009)

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71 pointstosh44 comments

My favorite story about the guy: https://medium.com/@CelikBugra/psychoanalytics-behind-the-ca...

TLDR: Cake mix was impopular and the Betty Crocker company did not understand why. They went to Bernays who theorized that it was because cake mix was "too easy" leading to housewives feeling guilty that they weren't really contributing anything to the cake. They changed the recipe to include a fresh egg instead of just water and the sales increased substantially.

In hindsight the solution seems so obvious. I wonder what lead to this insight. Did he get direct feedback, or did he intuit it?

> housewives feeling guilty

Or maybe the cake mix with dried egg powder didn't taste as good.

That's entirely possible, just not how the story goes. When it comes to story in people presented as "marketing geniuses", it's always good to remember that they were probably equally good at selling themselves and their story.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/125/

Yeah, the Freudian explanation for why this worked looks like pseudo-scientific gibberish.

> By the Freudian psychology, an unconscious gift from the woman to the husband. The woman offered her eggs and the guilt has just disappeared. Because as stated on changingminds.org, by the Freudian theory, “an egg also has the connotation of life and birth, making the creation of the cake more meaningful - the housewife thus ‘gives birth’ for her husband.”

that's because it is psuedo-scientific gibberish

It's the science of marketing aka population-scale mindfuckery. It's a solid science. It works. It rules the world. And you, yes you, are clutched within its iron claw, oblivious.

The 3 step method they use works shockingly well. Build a problem (not associated to your product/idea). If you can tie it to some sort of base emotion all the better. Sell what does fix it (happens to be a product/idea you have but still not associated to you). Sell your product/idea and show how the experts know your product/idea is the best. When it works it is quite stunning, and many have no idea it was even done to them.

There's this stuff called "Ovaltine". It's like chocolate milk powder

They offered it as a solution to that great national scourge, "children chewing without swallowing"

(Cue video of callow youth. Food hanging out of his greasy mouth)

Then they cite doctors telling us how Ovaltine is totally necessary for good health.

Ya, your 3step program

That is an example. But usually for the 3 steps to be effective it would be different distinct stages separated by time. You would for example read about 'the scourge' in some mags/newspapers. The mags would amp it up for weeks/months. Then 'scientists say' stage, usually the same news/mags/newspapers talking about it how 'some things are known to fight it, milk chocolate for example'. Get some peer reviewed papers written up to back it up, or '4 out of 5 kids agree' sort of thing. Then commercial time. Showing all three together. If you dump them all together you will get a small segment buying it. But if you prime the pump for them to be ready to accept the idea and solution. You get more traction on it. One downside is it is wickedly difficult to see when you are being subjected to it. As the campaign is designed to hide from you until the solution is presented.

Wait, isn't that exactly how they sell the vax?

It's how they sell everything. This behavior is shaped by profit motive first and foremost.

Yeah... one reason I don't use cake mix because by the time you have to have do the egg part yourself, you may as well just mix the rest too. Everything's a totally normal ingredient any minimally-stocked kitchen will have—which, the egg is too, but it's the messiest/fiddliest ingredient involved (not saying it's rocket science to crack a damn egg, but everything else is easier and less error-prone).

I might use it, sometimes, if it eliminated the egg step but still tasted good. I suspect it tasted like crap.

[EDIT] Should have written, the messiest and fiddliest ingredient necessarily involved. Chocolate can be much, much worse if you're melting bars rather than using powder, as can some other things that may be in a cake.

That is a concise and logical explanation, consistent with the popular narrative and affirms the agency of the common housewife. Smartly done!

> Or maybe the cake mix with dried egg powder didn't taste as good.

It's not one or the other and can easily be both reasons.

Theater is everything, everywhere, all the time.

Find out what they really want. To be loved, to be a good person, to be smart, to be successful, to have a bright future...

And then tell them a story about how that is exactly how it is.

They will buy it. Every time

This is taken almost verbatim from Century of the Self.

The full documentary is free on YouTube and worth the time.

I am very suspicious this is a Just-So story. This BBC article seems to agree (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171027-the-magic-cakes-...). Also interestingly credits the marketing aspect to Ernest Dichter instead of Bernays.

Quote: In later years, many would portray this as a pivotal moment in the history of cake mixes, the inflection point of a dramatic upward curve.

The truth is, though, that the cake companies already knew about the egg problem. In fact, as early as 1933 Duff had introduced a mix that had bakers add eggs themselves. “The housewife and the purchasing public in general seem to prefer fresh eggs and hence the use of dried or powdered eggs is somewhat of a handicap from a psychological standpoint,” reads the patent application (read more on Duff's cake patents in this lovely Bon Appetit story about cake mix). And actually, the mixes worked better that way. “The fact was one of the reasons cake mixes didn't taste good was they tasted like dried eggs,” says Shapiro. The companies performed surveys and asked women which version they would buy – the results were contradictory – and in the end, they just did as they pleased.

You -- fallible you! -- are not immune to propaganda.

Being able to understand the ulterior motives at play in advertising and PR more broadly does not absolve you of being caught under the spell. I had trouble reconciling this for a while after getting turned on to media criticism outlets, e.g. Citations Needed podcast[1]. But it is important to stay humble and remember that you are still a bag of electrified proteins that reacts essentially the same as other bags of electrified proteins, and so are subject to essentially the same forces.

[1] https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/

Manipulators tell you how special, wonderful, deserving and smart you are.

The socially conscious tell you how weak, falliable, unspecial and prone to folly you are.

The socially conscious have a really, really tough sell. At worst it becomes an exercise in catering to someone's pride in being "more woke" than those other dullards.

Robert Greene really hammered the point home in his opus "The Laws of Human Nature". People, all of us, need to cater to our vanity. We aren't well equiped to accept the idea that we can do stupid things or even just be stupid.

It's far easier to fool a person than to convince a person they've been fooled. The great struggle of our time isn't telling truth to power it's telling truth to our own communities...

And Bernays is the grand-uncle of one of Netflix’s founders. Small world.

I don’t know if Small World is the reason for that.

The Century of the Self was a great 4 part British documentary about this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

Came here to say this. Fantastic documentary, very eye-opening. Glad to see Bernays and the history of propaganda getting noticed more. Very relevant in today's age of mass propaganda.

Probably Adam Curtis's best documentary series.

I changed the URL from https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=461246..., which is mostly a radio episode, to a readable article with background. Other suggestions are welcome.

There's also this about Bernays: https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american...

and this: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3128

and Adam Curtis's famous documentary about this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

Sir, this quality of moderation is worth some multiple of what you are paid.

Imagine what Bernays would do if he were in control of a strife-monetising social media product.

Cheers!

TIL: 'Engineering Consent' was coined in 1955

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engineering_of_Consent

I always assumed this was a Noam Chomsky thing.

Chomsky talked of "Manufacturing Consent".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

with the difference being the point of view : Engineers are competent people, whereas Manufacturers are capitalists controlling means of production

Although the term wasn't coined yet, the idea of engineering consent goes back even further to the Enlightenment period, when Reason sought to overthrow King and Church. Weishaupt and his Illuminists (of conspiracy theory fame) reasoned that men were largely mechanistic in nature, and could be controlled by their passions. Therefore, whoever could control men's passions could control men. Their intentions were nobler then if you take them at face value (i.e. help men become enlightened beings rather than consumers), but illuminism was a crude form of the behaviorism and structural functionalism operating today. It's pretty interesting to trace the developments from then, up until the advertising and PR we are immersed in today.

The first episode of Mad Men alludes to Bernays work. They are trying to come up with a new campaign for Lucky Strike and he rejects an idea to base the campaign off of Freud’s research.

Mad Men missed the opportunity to really highlight that connection. By the 1950s Don Draper would have been intimately familiar with Freud and Bernays and the effort to get women to smoke. He was quite dismissive for being the best ad man in the world, even though the techniques he ultimately used were also rooted in the psychology of the consumer.

The campaign that Draper landed on, "It's Toasted", was actually created around 1917 or so I believe. Bit of an anachronism there.

Other interesting campaigns in the show: VW's bug, Kodak's Carousel, and of course the Coca-Cola ad at the very end. Truly wonderful show.

I think he was also behind the idea of marketing white goods not on their efficiency, but by their appeal to consumers. This is to say, he initiated the move away from quality as the sales pitch to where we are today - where white goods are flimsily made, hard to repair, break after their warranty - as this maximises profits at the expense of the customer.

On so many levels, its a shame we are so easily sold, for sure.

Strangely enough, Bernays was also the PR man behind water fluoridation[1]. He was hired by the Aluminum Company of America to help dispose of sodium fluoride, a by-product of the production of aluminum[2].

> The drive to encourage public acceptance of fluoride was handed over to Edward Bernays, known as the father of PR, or the original spin doctor, and the man who helped persuade women to take up smoking. "You can get practically any idea accepted," Bernays explained, "if doctors are in favour. The public is willing to accept it because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows or doesn't know."

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jun/08/lifeandhealt...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations_campaigns_of_...

To this day the medical establishment leans heavily on rhetoric like this over dialectic.

Bernays’s Propaganda[1] isn’t just a good book on the subject, it was literally an advertisement for his services.

[1] http://whale.to/b/bernays.pdf

> "You can get practically any idea accepted," Bernays explained, "if doctors are in favour. The public is willing to accept it because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows or doesn't know."

Doctors should try telling people to get flu and COVID vaccines. Oh wait..

64%+ of the entire diverse population of the USA got at least one shot of, from a layman's perspective, some kind of new experimental wonder drug. In under a year. That is an example of effective persuasion.

Then came the internet echo chambers and that authority shifted.

Don’t forget his laudable work with the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to smoke. Truly a champion of gender equality.

https://fcpp.org/2021/11/09/how-bernays-changed-the-world-th...

The story as told by Bernays himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pyyP2chM8k

Very much enjoyed this, very prescient

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Persuaders-Vance-Packard/dp/09...

http://centuryoftheself.com/

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