The Hidden Persuaders (Paperback)

by Vance Packard (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
"One of the best books around for demystifying the deliberately mysterious arts of advertising."-Salon

"Fascinating, entertaining and thought-stimulating."-The New York Times Book Review

"A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command"--The New Yorker

Originally published in 1957 and now back in print to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, The Hidden Persuaders is Vance Packard's pioneering and prescient work revealing how advertisers use psychological methods to tap into our unconscious desires in order to "persuade" us to buy the products they are selling.

A classic examination of how our thoughts and feelings are manipulated by business, media and politicians, The Hidden Persuaders was the first book to expose the hidden world of "motivation research," the psychological technique that advertisers use to probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers. Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate today's corporate-driven world began.

Featuring an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, The Hidden Persuaders has sold over one million copies, and forever changed the way we look at the world of advertising. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author
Vance Packard (1914-1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and best-selling author. Among his other books were The Status Seekers, which described American social stratification and behavior, The Waste Makers, which criticizes planned obsolescence, and The Naked Society, about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pocket; Updated edition (June 3, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671531492
• ISBN-13: 978-0671531492
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #821,291 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The strip-mining of human nature, December 4, 2002

By	Stanley Allen (League City, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Written at the cusp of the 'consumer revolution', this book is both a quaint historical piece and a prophesy of what was to come. The tangential thesis of the book is that by the mid-fifties, the standard problems in capitalism -- those of production and distribution of goods -- were solved, but that this introduced another problem: all of these goods must be consumed. So, it became necessary to step up the techniques used to market these goods.

Advertising was nothing new, but the psychological intricacy and sophistication in it was ratcheted up significantly. Using Freud, Jung, and whatever other foundation proved workable, social scientists and psychoanalysts honed their skills to develop an ever-growing repertoire of tricks that would induce us all to spend and consume at ever-higher levels.

Two things make the book relevant today: 1) nothing has changed either in the economic situation or in the techniques, except that both have become even more intense (two thirds of the 2002 U.S. GNP depends on consumer spending); and 2) no other book has yet come forward to do a better job at showing, in great anecdotal detail and for a broad audience, what depth marketing is all about.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Origins of Motivational Research in the U.S., July 31, 1999

By	Keidi Obi Awadu ([e-mail]) (Atlanta, Georgia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hidden Persuaders (Paperback)

THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS by Vance Packard stands as one of the more eye-opening accounts of the development of the motivational sciences in the 20th Century. What is being described by Packard is the evolution of a systematic relationship between merchandisers of America's then-booming manufacturing industries who teemed up with Madison Avenue-style advertising firms, who themselves were backed by a network of behavioral scientists. As described by Packard, this network not only developed novel and creative ways of reaching into the psyche of its intended target audiance to tap into hidden motivations; but in the process of turning us all into more compliant consumers, so shifted the values of the entire society that they changed American society for all time. Today many of us have virtually succumbed our natural "reality" to a phony existance based upon presenting an image of ourselves to our peers that is actually based upon media and market-generated values. Once we understand the process that created this vast consumer culture, with all it's attendant neuroses, we can then begin to fashion for ourselves a strategy for recovering our basic humanity. What is being described in THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS, is the origins of a system to manipulate us out of that humanity.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars We are manipulated by producers in every way., December 3, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Hidden Persuaders (Hardcover)

Vance Packard is a man ahead of his times. Although this book was published forty years ago, it is not dated at all. Packard shows us in a witty way how producers hire motivation researchers to determine why consumers buy the products they do. This is the first book I have read on this subject, and it is very interesting to read how people actually have a job in which they determine what motivates a person to buy a product. I knew that a product's appearance had some weight on its probability of selling, but I had no idea as to what extent this occurs in. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone. It is very easy to understand and straightforward.