Propaganda - Edward Bernays | Panda Meditation

Livre écrit par Edward Bernays qui est un appel à utiliser la Propagande et la Publicité pour modifier le Comportement et l’opinion du Peuple

Highlights

Introduction

“Derived from this celebrated society [the Congregatio de propaganda fide], the name propaganda applied in modern political language as a term of reproach to secret associations for the spread of opinions and principles which are viewed by most governments with horror and aversion,” writes the British chemist William Thomas Brande in 1842.2 However, while the word then could be used to make a sinister impression, it did not automatically evoke subversive falsehood, as it has since the 1920s

Introduction

The war had a complex effect on the repute of propaganda. Although the practice had, albeit unnamed, been variously used by governments for centuries (Napoleon was especially incisive on the subject, as well as an inspired practitioner), it was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their populations to fanatical assent. Here was an extraordinary state accomplishment: mass enthusiasm at the prospect of a global brawl that otherwise would mystify those very masses, and that shattered most of those who actually took part in it

Introduction

“public opinion” stood out as a force that must be managed, and not through clever guesswork but by experts trained to do that all-important job. Thus the war improved the status of those working in the fields of public suasion

Introduction

The great Allied campaign to celebrate (or sell) Democracy, etc., was a venture so successful, and, it seemed, so noble, that it suddenly legitimized such propagandists, who, once the war had ended, went right to work massaging or exciting various publics on behalf of entities like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, John D. Rockefeller, General Electric.

Introduction

from the signing of the Versailles Treaty to the Crash of 1929, there was high excitement in the booming field of peace-time propaganda. That reborn generation of admen and publicists, no longer common hucksters but professionals, sold their talents to Big Business through a long barrage of books, essays, speeches and events extolling the miraculous effects of advertising and/or publicity—i. e., propaganda, as the proponents of the craft, and their corporate clients, often kept referring to it, quietly. According to the propagandists’ evangelical self-salesmanship (many of them were in fact the sons of ministers), their revolutionary “science” would do far more than make some people richer. Just as during the war, propaganda would at once exalt the nation and advance the civilizing process, teaching immigrants and other folks of modest means how to transform themselves, through smart consumption, into happy and presentable Americans

Introduction

Like its wartime prototype, the post-war propaganda drive was an immense success, as it persuaded not just businessmen but journalists and politicians that “the manufacture of consent,” in Walter Lippmann’s famous phrase, was a necessity throughout the public sphere.4

Introduction

“Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts.”6 That passage is itself, of course, a stunning bit of propaganda, as it bluntly reconfirms the Manichaean plot that Creel & Co. had hammered home throughout the war: Germans always lie, Americans always tell the truth. How the German propaganda “had come to be associated with deceit and corruption” is a question Creel would rather not address

Introduction

as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see “propaganda” as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word’s demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it.

Introduction

His vision seems quite modest. The world informed by “public relations” will be but “a smoothly functioning society,” where all of us are guided imperceptibly throughout our lives by a benign elite of rational manipulators.

Introduction

Lippmann had arrived at the bleak view that “the democratic El Dorado” is impossible in modern mass society, whose members—by and large incapable of lucid thought or clear perception, driven by herd instincts and mere prejudice, and frequently disoriented by external stimuli—were not equipped to make decisions or engage in rational discourse. “Democracy” therefore requires a supra-governmental body of detached professionals to sift the data, think things through, and keep the national enterprise from blowing up or crashing to a halt. Although mankind surely can be taught to think, that educative process will be long and slow. In the meantime, the major issues must be framed, the crucial choices made, by “the responsible administrator.” “It is on the men inside, working under conditions that are sound, that the daily administration of society must rest.”9

Introduction

Bernays’s adaptation of it is both simple and enthusiastic: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” These “invisible governors” are a heroic elite, who coolly keep it all together, thereby “organizing chaos,” as God did in the Beginning. “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.”

Introduction

Propaganda is primarily a sales pitch, not an exercise in social theory. In other words, while Propaganda is by no means an exhaustive treatment of its subject, the book is edifying for its own propaganda tactics, and for the light it sheds obliquely on the hidden zeal with which most winning propagandists do their work, however “scientific” and detached they may appear to be (even to themselves).

Introduction

Always thinking far ahead, his aim was not to urge the buyer to demand the product now, but to transform the buyer’s very world, so that the product must appear to be desirable as if without the prod of salesmanship

Introduction

Bernays sold Mozart pianos, for example, not just by hyping the pianos. Rather, he sought carefully “to develop public acceptance of the idea of a music room in the home”—selling the pianos indirectly, through various suggestive trends and enterprises that make it de rigeur to have the proper space for a piano. The music room will be accepted because it has been made the thing. And the man or woman who has a music room, or has arranged a corner of the parlor as a musical corner, will naturally think of buying a piano. It will come to him as his own idea.

Introduction

Bernays sold the myth of propaganda as a wholly rational endeavor, carried out methodically by careful experts skilled enough to lead “public opinion.” Consistently he casts himself as a supreme manipulator, mastering the responses of a pliable, receptive population. “Conscious and intelligent manipulation,” “invisible governors,” “they who pull the wires which control the public mind,

Introduction

as if assuring us that he is too intelligent and self-possessed to fall for that spellbinder who excites the vulgar herd. Indeed, the same myth of the unmoved mover has been amply reconfirmed by some of history’s most effective agitators: Hitler liked to cast himself as a detached appraiser of his own frenzies at the podium, and Goebbels too believed himself to be completely cold inside, even as his oratory thrilled the crowd.

Introduction

Admakers—researchers, creative directors, copywriters, art directors, photographers—labor gradually toward mass reactions that, in general, are not explosive and immediate but incremental, individual, dispersed, half-conscious. As this book demonstrates, the public relations expert likewise seeks to make a gradual impression, after long research and sober planning

Introduction

in the magisterial Bernays we note the tendency to let his clients’ needs dictate “the truth.”

Introduction

Whatever cause they serve or goods they sell, effective propagandists must believe in it—or at least momentarily believe that they believe in it. Even he or she who propagates commodities must be to some extent a true believer. “To advertise a product you must believe in it. To convince you must be convinced yourself,” observes Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet

Introduction

Bernays’s approach, as ever, was more “scientific”:The newer salesmanship, understanding the group structure of society and the principles of mass psychology, would first ask, “Who is it that influences the eating habits of the public?” The answer, obviously, is: “The physicians.” The new salesman will then suggest to physicians to say publicly that it is wholesome to eat bacon. He knows as a mathematical certainty, that large numbers of persons will follow the advice of their doctors, because he understands the psychological relation of dependence of men upon their physicians. This was all very well; and yet the impressive scientism of Bernays’s way of selling bacon contradicts the inconvenient scientific fact that eating bacon has turned out to be not “wholesome” after all, what with its high fat content and cholesterol. Certainly this risk was not yet clear to the American medical establishment when, in the mid-Twenties, Bernays pitched the “hearty breakfast” for the Beechnut Packing Company. It is significant, however, that, in his universe, it is the preeminent consensus that determines what is “true.”

Introduction

As with the risks of smoking, so it has been, until very recently, with global warming, and so it is today with the carcinogenicity of cell phones, and the toxic side effects of fluoride, just to name a few underreported threats to public health. In all such cases, the investigative journalist is the propagandist’s natural enemy, as the former serves the public interest, while the latter tends to work against it.

Introduction

“Big business studies every move which may express its true personality,” the author writes, implying clearly that the corporate personality is always somehow likeable, attractive and benign—a notion as unsound as any Ptolemaic theorem or medieval superstition.

Introduction

Throughout the decade there had been a gradual, disorienting revelation of just how systematically, and how ingeniously, the Allied governments had fooled the peoples of two great democracies, Great Britain and, in particular, the USA. Once the thrill of victory had faded, and the troops came home (if they came home at all) disfigured or disabled, and the reasons for the war were now less clear than they had seemed, the sordid details of the propaganda drive against “the Hun” began to circulate, spread far and wide in a belated flood of memoirs, reminiscences, published diaries, after-dinner speeches and historical accounts. At first, the Allies’ fatal trickery was reported, and deplored, only in such liberal journals as the New Republic. By mid-decade, the dispiriting truth about the wartime propaganda was the subject of several highly damning exposés in the Saturday Evening Post, a rightist organ widely read. Throughout the press, “propaganda” was now commonly condemned;

Introduction

There were many more such critics in the Twenties and the Thirties than there are today; and their critiques were publicly accessible—far more than they are today.

Introduction

Bernays notes in this book, “its use is growing as its efficiency in gaining public support is recognized.” That propaganda easily seduces even those whom it most horrifies is a paradox that Bernays grasped completely; and it is one that we must try at last to understand, if we want to change the world that Edward Bernays, among others, made for us.

CHAPTER I - 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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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 million—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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to it attention through propaganda of all kinds.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

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

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

Leaders assert their authority through community drives and amateur theatricals.

CHAPTER I - ORGANIZING CHAOS

The opinions which he receives as a Rotarian, he will tend to disseminate in the other groups in which he may have influence. This invisible, intertwining structure of groupings and associations is the mechanism by which democracy has organized its group mind and simplified its mass thinking. To deplore the existence of such a mechanism is to ask for a society such as never was and never will be. To admit that it exists, but expect that it shall not be used, is unreasonable.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

In the days when kings were kings, Louis XIV made his modest remark, “L’Etat c’est moi.” He was nearly right.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

The people actually gained power which the king lost. For economic power tends to draw after it political power; and the history of the industrial revolution shows how that power passed from the king and the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage and universal schooling reinforced this tendency, and at last even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king. Today, however, a reaction has set in. The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities. It has been found possible so to mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction. In the present structure of society, this practice in inevitable. Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all received identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

The extent to which propaganda shapes the progress of affairs about us may surprise even well informed persons. Nevertheless, it is only necessary to look under the surface of the newspaper for a hint as to propaganda’s authority over public opinion. Page one of the New York Times on the day these paragraphs are written contains eight important news stories. Four of them, or one-half, are propaganda. The casual reader accepts them as accounts of spontaneous happenings. But are they? Here are the headlines which announce them: “TWELVE NATIONS WARN CHINA REAL REFORM MUST COME BEFORE THEY GIVE RELIEF,” “PRITCHETT REPORTS ZIONISM WILL FAIL,” “REALTY MEN DEMAND A TRANSIT INQUIRY,” “OUR LIVING STANDARD HIGHEST IN HISTORY, SAYS HOOVER REPORT,”

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

These examples are not given to create the impression that there is anything sinister about propaganda. They are set down rather to illustrate how conscious direction is given to events, and how the men behind these events influence public opinion. As such they are examples of modern propaganda. At this point we may attempt to define propaganda. Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group. This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether the enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president. Sometimes the effect on the public is created by a professional propagandist, sometimes by an amateur deputed for the job. The important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

We are proud of our diminishing infant death rate—and that too is the work of propaganda.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

anyone with sufficient influence can lead sections of the public at least for a time and for a given purpose. Formerly the rulers were the leaders. They laid out the course of history, by the simple process of doing what they wanted. And if nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses, they find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. Therefore, propaganda is here to stay.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group—persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social, and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror, and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

It takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organized into the social unit. Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.

CHAPTER II - THE NEW PROPAGANDA

The new propaganda, having regard to the constitution of society as a whole, not infrequently serves to focus and realize the desires of the masses. A desire for a specific reform, however widespread, cannot be translated into action until it is made articulate, and until it has exerted sufficient pressure upon the proper law-making bodies. Millions of housewives may feel that manufactured foods deleterious to health should be prohibited. But there is little chance that their individual desires will be translated into effective legal form unless their half-expressed demand can be organized, made vocal, and concentrated upon the state legislature or upon the Federal Congress in some mode which will produce the results they desire. Whether they realize it or not, they call upon propaganda to organize and effectuate their demand.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration; who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at? If we set out to make a list of the men and women who, because of their position in public life, might fairly be called the molders of public opinion, we could quickly arrive at an extended list of persons mentioned in “Who’s Who.” It would obviously include the President of the United States and the members of his Cabinet; the Senators and Representatives in Congress; the Governors of the forty-eight states; the presidents of the chambers of commerce in our hundred largest cities, the chairmen of the boards of directors of our hundred or more largest industrial corporations, the president of many of the labor unions affiliated in the American Federation of Labor, the national president of each of the national professional and fraternal organizations, the president of each of the racial or language societies in the country, the hundred leading newspaper and magazine editors, the fifty most popular authors, the presidents of the fifty leading charitable organizations, the twenty leading theatrical or cinema producers, the hundred recognized leaders or fashion, the most popular and influential clergymen in the hundred leading cities, the presidents of our colleges and universities and the foremost members of their faculties, the most powerful financiers in Wall Street, the most noted amateurs of sports, and so on.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

The idea of invisible government is relative. There may be a handful of men who control the educational methods of the great majority of our schools. Yet from another standpoint, every parent is a group leader with authority over his or her children.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public’s thoughts and actions is likewise expensive.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

Governments, whether they are monarchical, constitutional, democratic or communist, depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their efforts and, in fact, government is government only by virtue of public acquiescence

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

His first efforts are, naturally, devoted to analyzing his clients’ problems, and making sure that what he has to offer the public is something which the public accepts or can be brought to accept. It is futile to attempt to sell an idea or to prepare the ground for a product that is basically unsound.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

His next effort is to analyze his public. He studies the groups which must be reached, and the leaders through whom he may approach these groups. Social groups, economic groups, geographical groups, age groups, doctrinal groups, language groups, cultural groups, all these represent his divisions through which, on behalf of his client, he may talk to the public.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

Only after this double analysis has been made and the results collated, has the time come for the next step, the formulation of policies governing the general practice, procedure, and habits of the client in all those aspects in which he comes in contact with the public. And only when these policies have been agreed upon is it time for the fourth step.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

To communities it gave health surveys and expert counsel. To individuals it gave health creeds and advice. Even the building in which the corporation was located was made a picturesque landmark to see and remember, in other words to carry on the associative process. And so this company came to have a broad general acceptance. The number and amount of its policies grew constantly, as its broad contacts with society increased.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

After the public and the client are thoroughly analyzed and policies have been formulated, his work may be finished. In other cases the work of the public relations counsel must be continuous to be effective. For in many instances only by a careful system of constant, thorough and frank information will the public understand and appreciate the value of what a merchant, educator or statesman is doing.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

The counsel on public relations must be in a position to deal effectively with rumors and suspicions, attempting to stop them at their source, counteracting them promptly with correct or more complete information through channels which will be most effective, or best of all establish such relationships of confidence in the concern’s integrity that rumors and suspicions will have no opportunity to take root.

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

The counsel on public relations must maintain constant vigilance, because inadequate information, or false information from unknown sources, may have results of enormous importance

CHAPTER III - THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS

It must be repeated that his business is not to fool or hoodwink the public. If he were to get such a reputations, his usefulness in his profession would be at an end.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Mass psychology is as yet far from being an exact science and the mysteries of human motivation are by no means all revealed. But at least theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion with a fair degree of accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, jut as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Propaganda is not a science in the laboratory sense, but it is no longer entirely the empirical affair that it was before the advent of the study of mass psychology

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Propaganda, like economics and sociology, can never be an exact science for the reason that its subject-matter, like theirs, deals with human beings.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, not doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a mélange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday and hence it is the one which comes most prominently to his mind; because he a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its shares.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict send of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits, and emotions. In making up its mind, its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him, because anything associated with “the interests” seemed necessary corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

By playing upon a old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass of group emotions. In Great Britain, during the war, the evacuation hospitals came in for a considerable amount of criticism because of the summary way in which they handled their wounded. It was assumed by the public that a hospital gives prolonged and conscientious attention to its patients. When the name was changed to evacuation posts, the critical reaction vanished.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions. A man may believe that he buys a motor car because, after careful study of the technical features of all makes on the market, he has concluded that this is the best. He is almost certainly fooling himself. He bought it, perhaps, because a friend whose financial acumen he respects bought one last week; or because his neighbors believed he was not able to afford a car of that class; or because its colors are those of his college fraternity. It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may be that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would rather walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife. This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that vast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

It was one of the doctrines of the reaction psychology that a certain stimulus often repeated would create a habit, or that the mere reiteration of an idea would create a conviction.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

The newer salesmanship, understanding the group structure of society and principles of mass psychology, would first ask: “Who is it that influences the eating habits of the world?” The answer, obviously, is: “The physicians.” The new salesman will then suggest to physicians to say publicly that it is wholesome to eat bacon. He knows as a mathematical certainty, that large numbers of persons will follow the advice of their doctors, because he understands the psychological relation of dependence of men upon their physicians.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

What are the true reasons the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of on a new piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than e wants the commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars. The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom. He appeals perhaps to the home instinct which is fundamental. He will endeavor to develop public acceptance of the idea of a music room in the home. This he may do, for example, by organizing an exhibition of period music rooms designed by well-known decorators who themselves exert an influence on the buying groups. He enhances the effectiveness and prestige of these rooms by putting in them rare and valuable tapestries. Then, in order to create dramatic interest in the exhibit, he stages an event or ceremony. To this ceremony key people, persons known to influence the buying habits of the public, such as a famous violinist, a popular artist, and a society leader, are invited. These key people affect other groups, lifting the idea of the music room to a place in the public consciousness which it did not have before. The juxtaposition of these leaders, and the idea which they are dramatizing, are then projected to the wider public through various publicity channels. Meanwhile, influential architects have been persuaded to make the music room an integral architectural part of their plans with perhaps a specially charming niche in one corner for the piano. Less influential architects will as a matter of course imitate what is done by the men whom they consider masters of their profession. They in turn will implant the idea of the music room in the mind of the general public.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Under the old salesmanship the manufacturer said to the prospective purchaser, “Please buy a piano.” The new salesmanship has reversed the process and caused the prospective purchaser to say to the manufacturer, “ Please sell me a piano.”

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

One of the most effective methods is the utilization of the group formation of modern society in order to spread ideas. An example of this is the nationwide competitions for sculpture in Ivory soap, open to school children in certain age groups as well as professional sculptors. A sculptor of national reputation found Ivory soap an excellent medium for sculpture. The Procter and Gamble Company offered a series of prizes for the best sculpture in white soap. The contest was held under the auspices of the Art Center in New York city, an organization of high standing in the art world. School superintendents and teachers throughout the country were glad to encourage the movement as an educational aid for schools. Practice among school children as part of their art courses was stimulated. Contests were held between schools, between school districts and cities. Ivory soap was adaptable for sculpturing in the homes because mothers saved the shavings and the imperfect efforts for laundry purposes. The work itself was clean. The best pieces are selected from the local competitions for entry in the national contest. This is held annually at an important art gallery in New York, whose prestige with that of the distinguished judges, establishes the contest as a serious art event. In the first of these national competitions about 500 pieces of sculpture were entered. In the third, 2,500. And in the fourth, more than 4,000. If the carefully selected pieces were so numerous, it is evident that a vast number were sculptured during the year, and that a much greater number must have been made for practice purposes. The good will was greatly enhanced by the fact that this soap had become not merely the concern of the housewife but also a matter of personal and intimate interest to her children. A number of familiar psychological motives were set in motion in the carrying out of this campaign. The aethetic, the competitive, the gregarious (much of the sculpturing was done in school groups), the snobbish (the impulse to follow the example of a recognized leader), the exhibitionist, and—last but by no means least—the maternal. All these motives and group habits were put in concerted motion by the simple machinery of group leadership and authority. As if actuated by the pressure of a button, people began working for the sake of the gratification obtained in the sculpture work itself.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

This point is most important in successful propaganda work. The leaders who lend their authority to any propaganda campaign will do so only if it can be made to touch their own interests. There must be a disinterested aspect of the propagandist’s activities. In other words, it is one of the functions of the public relations counsel to discover at what points his client’s interests coincide with those of other individuals or groups. In the case of the soap sculpture competition, the distinguished artists and educators who sponsored the idea were glad to lend their services and their names because the competitions really promoted an interest which they had at heart—the cultivation of the aethetic impulse among the younger generation.

CHAPTER IV - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS

Such coincidence and overlapping of interests is as infinite as the interlacing of group formations themselves.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

Business is conscious of the public’s conscience

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

Business realize that its relationship to the public is not confined to the manufacture and sale of a given product, but includes at the same time the selling of itself and of all those things for which it stands in the public mind.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

Another cause for the increasing relationship is undoubtedly to be found in the various phenomena growing out of mass production. Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained—that is, if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

demand created the supply, today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

Business must express itself and its entire corporate existence so that the public will understand and accept it. It must dramatize its personality and interpret its objectives in every particular in which it comes into contact with the community (or the nation) of which it is a part.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

The public is not an amorphous mass which can be molded at will, or dictated to. Both business and the public have their own personalities which must somehow be brought into friendly agreement. Conflict and suspicion are injurious to both.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

Big business studies every move which may express its true personality. It seeks to tell the public, in all appropriate ways, by the direct advertising message and by the subtlest aethetic suggestion, the quality of the goods or services which it has to offer

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

While the concrete recommendations of the public relations counsel may vary infinitely according to individual circumstances, his general plan of work may be reduced to two types, which I might term continuous interpretation and dramatization by high-spotting. The two may be alternative or may be pursued concurrently. Continuous interpretation is achieved by trying to control every approach to the public mind in such a manner that the public receives the desired impression, often without being conscious of it. High-spotting, on the other hand, vividly seizes the attention of the public and fixes it upon some detail or aspect which is typical of the entire enterprise. When a real estate corporation which is erecting a tall office building makes it ten feet taller than the highest skyscraper in existence, that is dramatization.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

There is a responsibility toward the consumer, who is pressed by a clean and well managed factory, open to his inspection. And the general public, apart from its function as a potential consumer, is influenced in its attitude toward the concern by what it knows of that concern’s financial dealings, its labor policy, even by the livableness of the houses in which its employees dwell. There is no detail too trivial to influence the public in a favorable or unfavorable sense. The personality of the president may be a matter of importance, for he perhaps dramatizes the whole concern to the public mind. It may be very important to what charities he contributes, in what civic societies he holds office. If he is a leader in his industry, the public may demand that he be a leader in his community.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

knowledge of the public mind and of the ways in which it will react to an appeal, is a specialized function which must be undertaken by the professional expert.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

it is my conviction that as big business becomes bigger the need for expert manipulation of its innumerable contacts with the public will become greater.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

The doctors and dietitians tell us that a normal hard-working man needs only about two or three thousand calories of food a day. A banker, I suppose, needs a little less. But what am I to do? The fruit growers, the wheat raisers, the meat packers, the milk producers, the fishermen—all want me to eat more of their products—and are spending millions of dollars a year to convince me. Am I to eat to the point of exhaustion, or am I to obey the doctor and let the farmer and the food packers and the retailer go broke! Am I to balance my diet in proportion to the advertising appropriations of the various producers? Or am I to balance my diet scientifically and let those who overproduce go bankrupt?

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

Quantity production offers a standardized product the cost of which tends to diminish with the quantity sold. If low price is the only basis of competition with rival products, similarly produced, there ensues a cut-throat competition which can end only by taking all the profit and incentive out of the industry. The logical way out of this dilemma is for the manufacturer to develop some sales appeal other than mere cheapness, to give the product, in the public mind, some other attraction, some idea that will modify the product slightly, some element of originality that will distinguish it from products in the same line. Thus, a manufacturer of typewriters paints his machines in cheerful hues. These special types of appeal can be popularized by the manipulation of the principles familiar to the propagandist—the principles of gregariousness, obedience to authority, emulation, and the like.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

. It was found too that four groups might help to change hat fashions: the society leader, the style expert, the fashion editor and writer, the artist who might give artistic approval to the styles, and beautiful mannequins. The problem, then, was to bring these groups together before an audience of hat buyers. A committee of prominent artists was organized to choose the most beautiful girls in New York to wear, in a series of tableaux, the most beautiful hats in the style classifications, at a fashion fête at a leading hotel. A committee was formed of distinguished American women who, on the basis of their interest in the development of an American industry, were willing to add the authority of their names to the idea. A style committee was formed of editors of fashion magazines and other prominent fashion authorities who were willing to support the idea. The girls in their lovely hats and costumes paraded on the running-board before an audience of the entire trade. The news of the event affected the buying habits not only of the onlookers, but also of the women throughout the country. The story of the event was flashed to the consumer by her newspaper as well as by the advertisements of her favorite store. Broadsides went to the millinery buyer from the manufacturer. One manufacturer stated that whereas before the show he had not sold any large trimmed hats, after it he had sold thousands.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

It was the amusement business—first the circus and the medicine show, then the theater—which taught the rudiments of advertising to industry and commerce.

CHAPTER V - BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC

Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion