`Culture' and the limits of innovation in marketing: Ernest Dichter,motivation studies and psychoanalytic consumer research in Great Britain,1950s—1970s

Abstract

This article studies the reception of the Austro-American market and consumer researcher Ernest Dichter and of motivation research in the United Kingdom between the early 1950s and the 1970s. Dichter became a `brand' in 1950s America, where he advised corporations on how to use psychoanalysis in order to research the `hidden' motivations of their consumers. When Dichter arrived in London, British market researchers had already closed the market for market research services. Cultural barriers stemming from a globalized language of anti-consumerist cultural criticism and anxieties about the possibilities of `American' brainwash-marketing techniques limited the acceptance of a groundbreaking market research technique. In my conclusion, I relate the case of Ernest Dichter to the problem of purely cultural — not economic — barriers to innovation in marketing and the rise of a `guru industry' as part of the social history of management.