Getting Motivated By Ernest Dichter

Getting Motivated by Ernest Dichter: The Secret Behind Individual Motivations by the Man Who Was Not Afraid to Ask ""Why?"" presents a collection of personal account of the life experiences of Ernest Dichter. This book provides several recollections in the personal experiences of the author arranged in such a way that they hang together as psychological chain reactions rather than in a chronological or systematic fashion. This book is organized into 27 chapters with each chapter representing a specific experience that depicts a lesson in life. This book is a valuable resource for sociologists and psychologists. Readers who are seeking motivation in their lives will also find this book useful.

Ernest Dichter is famous as one of the founding fathers of motivational research. In applying the social sciences to a variety of problems, Dichter emphasized new approaches to problem solving, advertising, politics, and selling, and issues of social significance such as urban renewal, productivity, and drug addiction. As an author and corporate adviser, he used psychoanalytic theory and depth interviewing to uncover unconsciously held attitudes and beliefs. He goal was to help explain why people act the way they do and how positive behavioral change might be achieved. In The Strategy of Desire, Dichter both counters the argument that motivational research amounts to manipulation, and shows how the understanding and modification of human behavior is necessary for progress. Dichter's survey and analysis of behavior ranges widely. He examines everyday matters of product choice, as well as such broad civic issues as voter participation, religious toleration, and racial understanding. He shows that in order to achieve socially constructive goals, it is necessary to move beyond theological exhortation, which takes an unrealistic view of human morality, as well as beyond the limits of empirically oriented social science research, which only deals in appearances. Dichter sees human action as rooted in irrational and often unconscious motivation, which can usually be uncovered if the correct approach is used. In his consumer research, he analyzes the nonutilitarian importance of objects in everyday life, as well as how products and materials become bound with emotional resonance or acquire different meanings from different contexts or points of view. Dichter shows that success depends on the satisfaction of desires and a movement beyond the ethic of work and saving. Arguing that in an increasingly technological world, progress and social harmony are materially based, he advocates a morality of the good life in which prosperity and leisure lead to greater h

The work of motivation and consumer researcher Ernest Dichter was a milestone in the psychological creation of the modern consumer. This collection contextualizes Ernest Dichter within twentieth-century consumer culture and it charts the rise of psychological approaches to consumption in post-war Europe and North America.

The developing history of consumption is not so much a separate field, as a prism through which many aspects of social and political life may be viewed. The essays in this collection represent a variety of approaches in Europe and America; yet their commonalities suggest recent directions in the scholarship, raising such themes as consumption and democracy, the development of a global economy, the role of the state, the centrality of consumption to Cold War politics, the importance of the Second World War as a historical divide, the language of consumption, the contexts of locality, race, ethnicity, gender, and class, and the environmental consequences of twentieth-century consumer society. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, they explore the role of the historian as social, political, and moral critic. The essays discuss products, corporate strategies, government policies, and ideas about consumption. Unlike other studies of twentieth-century consumption, this book provides international comparisons.

What do consumers really want? In the mid-twentieth century, many marketing executives sought to answer this question by looking to the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. By the 1950s, Freudian psychology had become the adman's most powerful new tool, promising to plumb the depths of shoppers' subconscious minds to access the irrational desires beneath their buying decisions. That the unconscious was the key to consumer behavior was a new idea in the field of advertising, and its impact was felt beyond the commercial realm. Centered on the fascinating lives of the brilliant men and women who brought psychoanalytic theories and practices from Europe to Madison Avenue and, ultimately, to Main Street, Freud on Madison Avenue tells the story of how midcentury advertisers changed American culture. Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, James Vicary, Alfred Politz, Pierre Martineau, and the father of motivation research, Viennese-trained psychologist Ernest Dichter, adapted techniques from sociology, anthropology, and psychology to help their clients market consumer goods. Many of these researchers had fled the Nazis in the 1930s, and their decidedly Continental and intellectual perspectives on secret desires and inner urges sent shockwaves through WASP-dominated postwar American culture and commerce. Though popular, these qualitative research and persuasion tactics were not without critics in their time. Some of the tools the motivation researchers introduced, such as the focus group, are still in use, with "consumer insights" and "account planning" direct descendants of Freudian psychological techniques. Looking back, author Lawrence R. Samuel implicates Dichter's positive spin on the pleasure principle in the hedonism of the Baby Boomer generation, and he connects the acceptance of psychoanalysis in marketing culture to the rise of therapeutic culture in the United States.

From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. "Dazzling." —Financial Times Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu’s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium—from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook—has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of “attention merchants” has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.

How does advertising work? Does it have to attract conscious attention in order to transmit a 'Unique Selling Proposition'? Or does it insinuate emotional associations into the subconscious mind? Or is it just about being famous... or maybe something else again?