Consider the case of a Tennessee man who tried to marry his car. His plan was thwarted after he listed his fiancée’s birthplace as Detroit, her father as Henry Ford, and her blood type as 10W40. Under Tennessee law, only a man and a woman can legally wed.
His attachment may be a bit extreme (or so we hope), but there’s no doubt that cars function as sexual surrogates. This example underscores the ways that some of our possessions “speak” to us. In fact, these relationships start to look positively Freudian...Sigmund Freud proposed that much of one’s adult personality stems from a fundamental conflict between a desire to gratify physical needs and the necessity to function as a responsible member of society. Perhaps products like red convertibles provide an outlet to do just that.
Back in the 1950s, a school of thought called motivational research started to borrow Freudian ideas to understand the deeper meanings of products and advertisements. This approach adapted psychoanalytical (Freudian) interpretations with a heavy emphasis on unconscious motives. It basically assumed that we channel socially unacceptable needs into acceptable outlets—including product substitutes.
Ernest Dichter, a psychoanalyst who trained in Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century, pioneered this work. Dichter conducted in-depth interview studies on more than 230 different products, and actual marketing campaigns incorporated many of his findings. For example, Esso (now Exxon in the United States) for many years reminded consumers to “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” after Dichter found that people responded well to this powerful animal symbolism containing vaguely sexual undertones. These are some other insights that surfaced from this research:
Women equate the act of baking a cake from scratch with giving birth. Instant cake mixes didn’t sell well when they were introduced; they did better when they were reformulated to require the cook to break an egg into the mix.
Men are reluctant to donate blood because they fear their “vital fluids” will be depleted. The Red Cross addressed this fear with the slogan, “Give the gift of life” so that men would feel they were (symbolically) fertilizing others rather than being drained.
Men feel secure if they have a full drawer of neatly ironed shirts or folded socks.
White bread, cotton fabrics, and harsh household cleaning chemicals connote moral purity and cleanliness.
Kitchen appliances, boats, sporting goods, and cigarette lighters convey mastery over the environment.
Soups have magical healing powers, and carbonated drinks possess a magical effervescent property.
Houses with large doorknobs will sell better because they subconsciously remind prospective buyers of how the entrance to their own home felt when they were little and had tiny hands.
Although this Freudian perspective has not been in vogue among researchers for quite some time, the basic notion that marketers need to understand the “deep meanings” of products that go well beyond their basic functions is alive and well. For example, Carl Jung, another of Freud’s disciples, continues to influence some advertisers’ strategies (including the major ad agency Young & Rubicam). Freud was grooming Jung to be his successor, but his protégé was unable to accept Freud’s emphasis on sexual aspects of personality, and the two men went their separate ways. Jung went on to develop his own method of psychotherapy he called analytical psychology.
Jung believed that the cumulative experiences of past generations shape who we are today. He proposed that we each share a collective unconscious—a storehouse of memories that we inherit from our ancestors. For example, Jung would argue that many people are afraid of the dark because their distant ancestors had good reason to fear it. These shared memories create archetypes, or universally recognized ideas and behavior patterns. Archetypes involve themes, such as birth, death, or the devil, that appear frequently in myths, stories, and dreams.
Jung’s ideas may seem a bit far-fetched, but advertising messages, in fact, do often include archetypes. For example, two that Jung and his followers identified are the “old wise man” and the “earth mother.” These images appear frequently in marketing messages that use characters such as wizards, revered teachers, or even Mother Nature. Our culture’s infatuation with stories such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings speaks to the power of these images.