Forever Barbie by M. G. Lord Read Free Book Online Page B

charge seemed low. Dichter had masterminded a cunning
     campaign to peddle Barbie.
    Dichter was already a legend when the Handlers approached him. Quoted on nearly every page of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller in 1957, Dichter was hailed as a marketing Einstein—an evil Einstein, but an Einstein nonetheless. He pioneered
     what he called "motivational research," advertising's newest, hippest, and, in Packard's view, scariest trend—the manipulation
     of deep-seated psychological cravings to sell merchandise.
    Dichter's appeal to the Handlers was obvious. They had achieved their success through space-age materials and futuristic methodology.
     Dichter's approach, filled with Freudian symbols and clinical jargon, had a scientific veneer. It promised control over an
     otherwise chaotic marketplace. It seemed as daring in 1958 as advertising on television had been three years earlier.
    Dichter also had much in common with Ruth. He was a Jewish immigrant, just as her father had been. Born in Vienna, Herr Doktor
     Dichter studied psychology at the University of Vienna and trained as a lay analyst. When World War II broke out, he fled
     to Paris; then in 1937, the same year that Ruth moved from Denver to Los Angeles, he tried to emigrate to New York. But because
     he and his wife had neither $10,000 nor proof of a stateside job, they were turned away.
    Enraged, he lashed out at Llewelyn Thompson, the American vice consul in Paris, who had stopped them. "All you care about
     is having people come to the U.S. who have rich relatives," he said. If he were permitted to emigrate, he would revolutionize
     commerce by applying the principles of psychology to the selling of products. Captivated, Thompson listened to Dichter's pitch.
     Then he intervened in Washington to have the Dichters admitted.
    Dichter seduced corporate America in equally record time. He sent off unsolicited letters to six big firms, explaining why
     he thought they were in trouble and how his insights could help. Four responded, and the work he did for three—Ivory Soap, Esquire magazine, and the Chrysler Corporation—put him on the map.
    Dichter didn't just compare brands for Ivory, he examined the role of cleanliness in American life. He didn't euphemize for Esquire, he confirmed what its editors "didn't dare" say—that "naked girls" sold the magazine. Sex also came up in his research for
     Chrysler. Men viewed sedans like wives; they were "comfortable and safe." Convertibles were like mistresses; they were "youthful,"
     beckoning to "the dreamer" within. Thus to lure men into showrooms, car dealers should use convertibles as "bait."
    Dichter packaged himself as cleverly as he advised clients to package their products. He worked out of a twenty-six-room castle
     on a Westchester mountaintop, the East Coast equivalent of Jack Ryan's fortress in Bel Air. There, he watched children play
     with toys from behind a one-way mirror. He performed "depth interviews" on a "psycho-panel" of several hundred neighborhood
     families. "He never asked a direct question," explained his wife, Hedy, because a confused interviewee was more honest.
    For a man whom the Dale Carnegie Institute had retained as a consultant, Dichter was surprisingly adept at making enemies,
     among them Betty Friedan, who filled a whole chapter of The Feminine Mystique with his sins. So great was her outrage that she rarely referred to him by name, calling him simply "the manipulator."
    Dichter's research, she found, documented her thesis: that being a housewife made most women miserable. But Dichter saw nothing
     wrong with their misery; rather, he sought to exploit it—by filling their anguished, barren lives with products. She paraphrases
     him: "Properly manipulated (if you are not afraid of that word,' he said), American housewives can be given the sense of identity,
     purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack—by the buying of things."
    Unmoved by