The Happiness Industry (11 page)

To complete the science of advertising, it was necessary that some form of feedback was also built into the system that would bring information back to the marketer. This could also be understood in behavioural terms, that is, whether a given ad directly prompted a certain response. For instance, discount coupons could be included in newspaper advertisements, to be cut out and used to purchase the product in question. This feedback mechanism would allow the marketer to discover which ads
stimulated the best response. Seventy years later, the rise of online advertising and e-commerce would make such behavioural analysis of marketing effectiveness far more widespread: the response of the person viewing an ad is that much easier to assess, in terms of click-throughs and purchases.

In the 1920s, the risk of Resor and Watson's scientific exuberance was that they overlooked what members of the public actually thought and felt, so confident were they that they could dictate emotional responses from scratch. Corporate America could not depend on this leap of faith alone. Behaviourism's radically scientific view of the mind suggested there was nothing to fear here. There was nothing lurking, hidden, in the dark recesses of the mind that actually existed beyond what could be observed by psychologists. In fact, the very idea of the ‘mind' was just a philosophical distraction.

The worry this generates is that a brand (or, for that matter, a politician or ideology or policy) might have become unappealing in ways that are apparent to the public but not yet to scientists and elites. The science of desire also required discovering what people wanted, finding out what they hoped for, in addition to trying to shape it. Doing this required an unusual psychological technique that Watson had hoped to abandon: speaking to people.

Glimpsing democracy

Watson could not help but notice that humans have a tendency to speak. He referred to this as ‘verbal behaviour'. He was even prepared to accept that it could play a role in psychological research, though a deeply regrettable one. He ruefully reflected that:

We suffer in psychology today greatly because methods for observing what goes on in another individual's internal mechanisms in general are lacking. This is the reason we have to depend in part at least upon his own report of what is taking place. We are gradually breaking away from this inexact method; we shall break away very rapidly when the need is more generally recognized.
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What Bentham called the ‘tyranny of sounds' frustrates the behaviourist as much as the utilitarian. Today, the facial-coders, neuromarketers and eye-trackers are living Watson's dream of ‘breaking away' from subjective reports of experience, and finding supposedly more objective routes to our internal states.

Before behavioural psychology or market research achieved this ‘break-away' feat, they found themselves in some quite unusual alliances. In the process, business came to understand people not only as passive recipients of corporate ‘education' or ‘stimuli', but as active, tentatively political actors with judgements about the world around them. If the task was to find out what people felt, wanted or thought, going out and asking them risked revealing some far more radical responses than JWT or Watson would have been prepared to countenance. What if they were sick of mass-produced goods? What if they didn't want lots more advertising? What if, above all, they wanted a say?

As the craze for psychological analysis swept American business over the course of the 1920s, large foundations such as Rockefeller and Carnegie looked to fund cutting-edge forms of market research. Statisticians had just invented randomized sampling methods, which greatly improved the authority of surveys as representations of large populations.
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Before sampling methods became available, surveys were very much skewed in
terms of who happened to respond to them. They gave a flavour of opinion, but this couldn't claim to be typical. The foundations offered to fund researchers who would put the new sampling techniques to work in the service of better market intelligence on the part of US corporations. But they were frustrated to discover that most of the individuals or organizations capable of delivering this type of knowledge were political activists, socialists and sociologists.
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Since social surveys had first been conducted in Europe in the 1880s, they had tended to be carried out in pursuit of progressive political agendas. Charles Booth in East London, or W. E. B. Du Bois in Philadelphia, set the stage for quantitative sociological research, which would go out and find how ordinary people lived, by seeing them in their domestic environments and asking them questions. The techniques for doing this work became increasingly professionalized with the establishment of progressive institutions such as the London School of Economics and the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC.

As the statistical techniques of social research developed, they became a matter of public fascination in their own right. One of the studies funded by Rockefeller became a national obsession, debated across the mainstream media. Conducted by a socialist husband and wife, Robert and Helen Lynd, from 1924 onwards, the ‘Middletown Studies' produced a series of best-selling publications. The research purported to hold up a mirror to American society, revealing banal yet fascinating details of the minutiae of how people went about their day-to-day lives. The researchers were hopeful that people would read these studies and challenge the culture of consumerism that was engulfing them.

The Rockefeller Foundation believed that they were helping to identify new ways of connecting social values to corporate
agendas. The Lynds believed they were helping to raise class-consciousness. At the intersection of the market and democratic socialism, the new survey techniques could serve either and both goals at the same time. Following a sequel 1937 study, ‘Middletown in Transition', one sales journal announced that ‘the only two books that are absolutely necessary for an advertising man are the Bible and Middletown!'
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A new form of shared national self-consciousness had occurred, and its political implications were entirely open-ended.

These sorts of unlikely ideological alliances became a feature of how psychological surveys would advance over the course of the 1930s. The same techniques of enquiry moved seamlessly among market research departments, sociology, socialist campaigns and the media. In one of the more extreme ideological balancing acts, the émigré Frankfurt School Marxist Theodor Adorno was hired to work on another Rockefeller-funded research project, to study CBS radio audiences, along with the psychologists Hadley Cantril, Paul Lazarsfeld and a future president of CBS, Frank Stanton. Adorno had no immediate objection to the use of survey methods, which he saw as potentially emancipatory. He recognized that surveys had the capacity to challenge the dominance of the market, as a form of collective expression. But he was quickly appalled by the more simplistic aspect of the research, in which individuals were invited to push buttons marked ‘like' and ‘dislike' when played different types of music. He left the project, which was soon redesigned to serve the needs of the CBS marketing department more closely.

In Britain, market research was pioneered by a number of left-wing intellectuals and campaigners, including the philanthropist Joseph Rowntree and the Labour Party advisor Mark Abrams.
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Like the Lynds, figures such as Abrams were openly critical of
advertising and consumer culture, yet never gave up on the idea that market research could be used in a more noble fashion. With more objective knowledge of how people really lived, perhaps business might focus on serving real desires and needs, and not manufacturing new ones. A British equivalent of the Middletown studies, The Mass Observation Project, was launched in 1937.

In defiance of the behaviourist prejudice that humans are automatons to be programmed, these survey specialists had come to view individuals as the bearers of their own personal ‘attitudes', towards anything from Coca-Cola, to the Catholic Church, to the government. These attitudes were psychological phenomena that were amenable to quantification. As someone with an ‘attitude', I am able to tell you how much I like a given product or institution on a scale of -5 to +5. But crucially, in ways that defy the behaviourist prejudice, I alone am best placed to know what that attitude is, and any scientist who wishes to know will have to ask me. Button-pressing machines for the capturing of attitudes (like the ‘worm' that reveals how the audience feels during a presidential debate, or the Facebook ‘like' button) cut out the use of speech from attitudinal research, but not the judgement of the attitude-holder. This was the crypto-democratic underbelly of how market research developed as the Great Depression took hold, and elites grew increasingly concerned as to what the masses had in mind.

Understanding the attitudes of radio audiences, newspaper readers and the voting public became big business over the course of the 1930s. It also became big politics. In 1929 and 1931, President Herbert Hoover commissioned surveys on social trends and consumer habits, partly in the hope of understanding what level of political unrest might be brewing. This variety of political knowledge soon became commercially available, with
the establishment of George Gallup's opinion-polling company in 1935. When Gallup predicted the outcome of the 1936 presidential election with uncanny accuracy, the prestige of his techniques soared. President Franklin Roosevelt was a compulsive commissioner of polls from then on, and hired Hadley Cantril (formerly of the CBS radio research project) as his in-house pollster.

Anti-capitalism for sale

Once the judgement and voice of the ordinary person is admitted into market research, things can start to shift in a democratic direction. This is an unpredictable and – from the perspective of a corporation, government or advertising account executive – worrying situation. It contains the possibility that drove the Lynds to conduct the Middletown studies, or Abrams's market research activities, namely that people may report a negative attitude towards consumerism, or even towards capitalism itself.

On the other hand, it is precisely the capacity to detect such threats that made these techniques indispensable for corporations and governments. Roosevelt may have conducted endless polls on how the public perceived his policies, but he never once altered a policy in response. Cantril revealed that every commission for a new attitudinal study also included the requirement for advice on ‘how the attitude might be corrected', for which read ‘propaganda'.
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Combine an effective survey technique with a ruthless behaviourist approach to advertising and you have a complete information loop. Messages go out to the public, individuals respond via behaviour and surveys, and information then returns
to the message-sender. Each element of this has changed dramatically since the 1930s. The emphasis on mass society and the attitude of the general public came to appear dated in the post-war period, as smaller consumer niches started to appear and multiply. In place of the mass survey, another crypto-democratic form of consultation came to the fore, namely the ‘focus group'. The rise of digital ‘data analytics' represents the latest phase in this evolution. Meanwhile, the current neuromarketing frontiers of behaviourism make John B. Watson look positively innocent by comparison.

What has remained constant, however, is the interplay and tension between behaviourist technique and quasi-democratic forms of consumer voice. The behaviourist does not want to hear what people feel, want or demand; he wants to discover ways of producing feelings, wants or demands, as objective entities which can be seen. This way, he believes he can eliminate the subject from psychology altogether, producing an entirely scientific basis for business practices such as advertising. The problem is that he ends up reliant on his own presupposition about what these feelings mean, drawing on his own experiences and ideals about what rational behaviour might look like. No amount of data can explain what ‘happiness' or ‘fear' means to someone who has never experienced them himself. If the researcher happens to be located in an advertising agency or a business school, terms like ‘choice', ‘desire', ‘emotion' and ‘rationality' take on an unavoidably consumerist hue. Behaviourism and the advertising industry are necessarily parasitic on pre-existing spaces and techniques of deliberation, or else they have no way of escaping their own presuppositions or discovering what other people's emotions and desires actually mean.

The advertiser who does listen, on the other hand, may be
somewhat disturbed by what she hears. She may discover that people want a form of ‘authenticity' or ‘community' or sheer ‘reality' that no product or advert can deliver. The challenge then becomes one of how to package up critical, political, democratic ideals in ways that can be safely delivered via products or public policies, without disrupting the status quo. Elements of anti-capitalist politics, which promise an uncommodified, more honest existence, have long been a fixture of advertising copy. As far back as the 1930s, advertisements contained images of pre-industrial, communal and family life, which seemed to be imperilled by the chaos of the industrial American city.
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By the 1960s, counter-cultural imagery was featuring in commercials, even before the counter-culture had fully emerged.
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Under the influence of market research, political ideals are quietly converted into economic desire. The cold mechanics of marketing and the critique of capitalism are locked into a constant feedback loop, such that there is no remaining idea of what freedom might look like, beyond that of consumption.

In utilitarian terms, the trick of marketing is to maintain a careful balance between happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain. The market must be designed as a space in which desires can be pursued but never fully satisfied, or else the hunger for consumption will dwindle. Marketers speak of various emotions today, including ‘liking' and ‘happiness', but these positive ones can never be the end of the matter. ‘Anxiety' and ‘fear' are also important parts of the mix, or else the shopper may find a degree of peace and comfort which requires no further satisfaction.