In the 1950s there was a consumer revolution. A huge range of new products were sold and the advertising industry was created to sell them. For the first time, people were hit with an onslaught of new advertising. At first it was unsophisticated, but it quickly became very skilful and manipulative.

Large corporations became ruthless in their manipulation of the consumer. They used industrial designers to give them a good image, no matter what they sold. For example, Raymond Loewy designed the logo for Lucky Strike cigarettes, which is still in use today. Today many designers would question whether they should be working for companies like this.

Some critics realised that advertising was often used unethically. A writer called Vance Packard wrote a book entitled The Hidden Persuaders (1957), which attacked the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue in New York. He shows that these firms had a good understanding of consumer psychology and used it to manipulate people into buying things they didn’t really need:

The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry. Professional persuaders have seized upon it in their groping for more effective ways to sell us their wares – whether products, ideas, attitudes, candidates, goals, or states of mind.

Packard also argues that these techniques were being adopted more generally within society.

Seemingly, in the probing and manipulating nothing is immune or sacred. The same Chicago ad agency has used psychiatric probing techniques on little girls. Public-relations experts are advising churchmen how they can become more effective manipulators of their congregations. In some cases these persuaders even choose our friends for us, as at a large “community of tomorrow” in Florida. Friends are furnished along with the linen by the management in offering the homes for sale. Everything comes in one big, glossy package. Sombre examples of the new persuaders in action are appearing not only in merchandising but in politics and industrial relations. The national chairman of a political party indicated his merchandising approach to the election of 1956 by talking of his candidates as products to sell. In many industrial concerns now the administrative personnel are psycho-tested, and their futures all charted, by trained outside experts. And then there is the trade school in California that boasts to employers that it socially engineers its graduates so that they are, to use the phrase of an admiring trade journal, “custom-built men” guaranteed to have the right attitudes from the employer’s standpoint.