Ernest Dichter and The Emotional Shopper

Ernest Dichter and Emotional Shopping

What, you might ask, has putting a tiger in your tank got to do with Women Sex and Shopping?  To which there two answers:  Quite a lot and Ernest Dichter.

Dichter was a Viennese (where else) psychologist who started to peddle his theories in the 1930s and by the 1960s was hugely influential on companies like Proctor & Gamble, DuPont and Exxon (hence the ‘Tiger in the Tank’ campaign).  We first came across Dichter when we started to research women’s motivations when shopping and this particularly good essay in The Economist reminded us just how important he was and why the things he perceived have an acute relevance today.

http://www.economist.com/node/21541706

 “You would be amazed to find how often we mislead ourselves, regardless of how smart we think we are, when we attempt to explain why we are behaving the way we do,” Dichter observed in 1960, in his book “The Strategy of Desire”. He held that marketplace decisions are driven by emotions and subconscious whims and fears, and often have little to do with the product itself. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Dichter saw human motivation as an “iceberg”, with two-thirds hidden from view, even to the decision-maker. “What people actually spend their money on in most instances are psychological differences, illusory brand images,” ….

And as the Economist goes on to explain, Dichter became a discarded guru by the 1970’s but his ideas about the role of the unconscious are coming back into fashion.  We would entirely agree - and the whole notion of the breadth and inter-connectivity of Pleasure Goods is supported by Dichter’s work.  Our research work with smaller boutiques who have immersive environments, get product mixes right and play on subliminal erotic drivers proves beyond doubt that, in every case, their customers display different, frequent and far more profitable buying behaviours.