STUDY TASK 1// Century Of The Self Part 1

TEN TOP POINTS:

1. Bernays Showed Corporations that they could sell products by associating them with their consumers unconscious desires, rather than rational thought and reason. 

2. This makes the population happy and therefore docile, allowing the powerful to retain power. 

3. Bernays based his corporate strategy on his succes of 'selling the war' (ww1) to the American public, he used the slogan "Make the World a Safer Democracy". When France was liberated the people felt a personal freedom was restored and Bernays wanted to traslate this into the consumer market. 

4. Bernays used the female desire for equality to sell cigarette's. By calling them 'Torches Of Freedom' women could use cigarettes to challenge male sexuality. A woman who smokes could be powerful and independent. 

5. Irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others. Products could be sold to make the consumer seem more important and individual.

6. Bernays had successfully created an emotional connection between products and people. 

7. Before the war products were sold only if they were needed. After Bernays convinced people that they wanted something more than they needed it, that it was natural to 'desire' something. Paul Mazer said that 'mans desire should overpower his needs'. 

8. Bernays used psychoanalysis to manipulate basic human desires with public relations exercises:
- Convinced film stars to endorse products, with the view that people would strive to be like them on a basic human level. 
- He got celebrities to turn up on the red carpet with his clients clothing on. 
- Persuaded organisations to set up fake 'independent studies' to lie about health or beauty benefits of products. 
- Associated cars with a dominant male figure and also male sexuality. 

9. As society developed it became more important 'to be a consumer than it was to be a citizen'. People became concerned with 'personal freedom' rather than for the good of the majority. 

10. After the re-election of Roosevelt, a man who opposed big business control after the stock market crash of 1929, big business fought back by allowing Bernays to convince the populous that Democracy could not work without Free-Market Capitalism. He did this at the New York world fair, painting an image where corporations drove the progress of society and politicians held it back. Consumerism was reborn.