By the late
60s, the idea of self exploration was spreading rapidly in America.
Encounter groups became the center of what was seen as a radical
alternative culture based on the development of the self free of a
corrupt capitalist culture. And it was beginning to have a serious
effect on corporate America because these new selves were not
behaving as predictable consumers.
Stanford
Research Institute (SRI) in California, worked for corporations and
government. It had done much of the early work on computers and was
also working for the department of defense on what would become the
"Star Wars" project. In 1978 a group of economists and
psychologists at SRI decided to find a way to read, measure, and
fulfill the desires of these new unpredictable consumers.
As Jay
Ogilvy, Director of Psychological Values Research (SRI 1979-88),
described: “The idea was to create a rigorous tool for measuring
a whole range of desires, wishes, values, that prior to that time had
been kind of overlooked. They say in business, you know, 'What gets
measured, gets done'. We were basically telling manufacturers, if you
are really going to satisfy not just the basic needs but individuated
wants, whims and desires of more highly developed human beings, you
are going to have to segment, you are going to have to individuate.”
To do this,
SRI turned for help to those who had begun the liberation of the
self. In particular, one of the leaders of the human potential
movement, a psychologist called Abraham Maslow. Through the observing
the work of places like Esalen, Maslow had invented a new system of
psychological types. He called it the hierarchy of needs, and it
described the different emotional stages that people had went through
as they liberated their feelings. At the top was self-actualization.
This was the point at which individuals became completely
self-directed and free of society.
The team at
SRI thought that Maslow's hierarchy might form a basis for a new way
to categorize society. Not by social class, but by different
psychological desires and drives. To test this, they designed a huge
questionnaire with hundreds of questions about how people saw
themselves - their inner values. The questions were designed to see
whether people fitted into Maslow's categories.
According to
Amina Marie Spengler, Director Psychological Values Research Program
(1978-86): “We were trying to find out what people really felt
like. So we asked these really penetrating questions and we hired a
company that administers surveys to do them and they said they had
never seen anything like it. Usually you have to send out a postcard
and then in six weeks another postcard and then you have to call the
people up, you know to get the return rates up, we had an 86 percent
return and they only sent out a postcard. People loved filling out
this questionnaire. We got several questionnaires back with a note
attached saying: do you have any other questionnaires I can fill out?
Because we were asking people to think about things that they had
never thought about before and they liked thinking about them. Like
what they felt inside, what motivated them, what was their life
about, what was important to them. It was sort of like, wow.”
The answers
were then analyzed by a computer. It revealed there were underlying
patterns in the way people felt about themselves which fitted
Maslow's categories. And at the top of the hierarchy was a large and
growing group which cut across all social classes.
The SRI
called them the inner directives. These were people who felt they
were not defined by their place in society but by the choices they
made themselves. But what SRI discovered, was that these people could
be defined by the different patterns of behavior through which they
chose to express themselves. Self
expression was not infinite, it fell into identifiable types. The SRI
team invented a new term for it: lifestyles. They had managed
to categorize the new individualism. They called their system "Values
and Lifestyles", VALs for short.
SRI created
a simplified questionnaire with just 30 key questions. Anyone who
answered them could be immediately be fitted into a dozen or so, of
these groups. It allowed businesses to identify which groups were
buying their products and from that, how the goods could be marketed
so they became powerful emblems of those groups inner values and
lifestyles. It was the beginning
of lifestyle marketing.
As Amina
Marie Spengler also described: “So it allowed people not just to
look at people as demographics groups of age and income or whatever,
but to really understand the underlying motivations. I mean, most of
marketing was looking at people's actions and trying to figure out
what to do, but what we were doing was we were trying to look at
people's underlying values so that we could predict what is their
lifestyle, what kind of house did they live in, what kind of car did
they drive. So the corporations were then able to sell things to them
by understanding them, by having labels, by knowing what people
looked like, by where they lived, by what their lifestyles are.”
If a new
product expressed a particular group's values, it would be bought
them. This is what made the Values and Lifestyles system so powerful.
It's ability to predict what new products, self-actualizers would
choose. This power was about to be demonstrated dramatically. VALs
was about to show not just what products they would buy, but the
politicians they were going to choose to elect.
Taken from
the documentary The
Century of the Self by Adam
Curtis.
Comments
Post a Comment