Skip to main content

The birth of lifestyle marketing in the late 70s


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

Popular posts from this blog

Oct. 7 Reports Implode: Beheaded Babies, NY Times Scandal, & More

Glenn Greenwald    

Πώς ο Γκρίνμπεργκ μπορεί να θάψει το καθεστώς Μητσοτάκη

του system failure    Είναι ξεκάθαρο ότι η αναμφίβολη πρωτοκαθεδρία του καθεστώτος Μητσοτάκη οφείλεται σχεδόν αποκλειστικά σε μια άκρως επιθετική επικοινωνιακή εκστρατεία που είχε καταφέρει μέχρι στιγμής να κρύβει κάτω από το χαλί (τουλάχιστον ως ένα βαθμό) τον αυταρχισμό και τη διαφθορά του καθεστώτος, καθώς και τις καταστροφικές πολιτικές που εφαρμόζει.  Και δεν είναι πλέον μυστικό, ότι ο άνθρωπος-κλειδί πίσω από αυτή την εκστρατεία είναι ο Αμερικανός δημοσιοσχετίστας, Σταν Γκρίνμπεργκ .    Όμως καθώς το καθεστώς επαναπαύθηκε στις δάφνες της νίκης των τελευταίων βουλευτικών εκλογών, τα μεγάλα προβλήματα συνέχισαν να συσσωρεύονται και φάνηκε ότι το καθεστώς είτε δεν ήθελε, είτε δεν μπόρεσε να τα αντιμετωπίσει. Έτσι, είδαμε σε σύντομο χρονικό διάστημα να έρχονται τα πρώτα σημαντικά πλήγματα στην πρωτοκαθεδρία του, μέσα από τα αποτελέσματα των δημοτικών και περιφερειακών εκλογών. Παρόλα αυτά, η αλαζονεία των καθεστωτικών στελεχών παρέμεινε αμετάβλητη, καθώς θεώρησαν ότι η τραγωδία των Τ

Zionist and US imperialist criminals are about to grab the natural gas off shore Gaza

globinfo freexchange   As the genocide against Palestinians of Gaza is about to be completed with an act of unprecedented brutality by the Zionists and butcher Netanyahu through the bombardment of about 1.4 million civilians in Rafah, it seems that they have already set their next primary goal. Which, in short, is to grab the natural gas resources off shore Gaza, together with their US imperialist buddies whose contribution to the genocide has been undoubtedly critical.     As already reported , in 2007, Hamas came to power and Israel launched an offensive on Gaza Strip, leaving behind 1,400 dead Palestinians, but taking with it the gas fields. Within a year, Israel announced the discovery of the Leviathan natural gas field, which did include Gaza's riches, valued at 453 billion dollars. But Gazans have been denied around 47 billion dollars in revenue. As for Tel Aviv, it's gunning to become a new hub. At that moment in time, that is 2022, Russian oil and gas were sanctioned.

Israel’s Descent Into Madness & the Holocaust Comparison

BreakThrough News   Rania Khalek was joined by Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany and associate professor at Koc University in Istanbul, to discuss Israel’s descent into genocidal fascism. Prof. Amar addresses whether it’s useful to make Holocaust and Nazi comparisons and the real reason behind the West’s unshakeable loyalty attitude when it comes to Israel’s barbarism.   

Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland Ends Her Reign: Exposing a Catastrophic Career

Glenn Greenwald    

The Shadowy, Intelligence-Linked Group Driving the US Towards War With Iran

"United Against Nuclear Iran does not miss an opportunity to try to bring the United States closer to a military conflict with Iran. And on the other side of the equation, they also have worked very hard to oppose efforts to de-escalate the U.S.-Iran relationship."   by Alan Macleod   Part 7 - A Lesson From History   The history of Iran has been intimately intertwined with the United States since at least 1953 when Washington orchestrated a successful coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had refused U.S. demands to stamp out Communist influences in his country and had nationalized the nation’s oil. The U.S. installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a puppet ruler. An unpopular and authoritarian ruler, the Shah was overthrown in the Revolution of 1979. Since then, it has become a target for regime change, and its nuclear program is something of an obsession in the West. Often orchestrated by UANI officials while they were in government, the U.S. has carried

Το σκάσιμο της φούσκας Μητσοτάκη με νέα επίσημη χρεοκοπία και οριστικό τέλος της μεταπολίτευσης

του system failure   Τα αποτελέσματα των εκλογών της 25ης Ιουνίου ήταν λίγο-πολύ αναμενόμενα όσον αφορά τις πρώτες θέσεις με βάση και τα αποτελέσματα της πρώτης κάλπης του Μαίου. Αν συμπεριλάβουμε και το ποσοστό της αναμενόμενης αποχής, δεν μας έδωσαν κάποια ιδιαίτερη έκπληξη. Αυτό όμως που φαίνεται να αιφνιδίασε ακόμα και το συστημικό κατεστημένο, είναι η είσοδος των δύο υπερσυντηρητικών, ακροδεξιών κομμάτων Νίκη και Σπαρτιάτες, με το τελευταίο να έχει ξεκάθαρες διασυνδέσεις με τον πρώην Χρυσαυγίτη, Ηλία Κασιδιάρη. Παρά τη μεγάλη νίκη Μητσοτάκη, οι μιντιακοί ινστρούχτορες της καθεστωτικής προπαγάνδας εμφανίστηκαν σε γενικές γραμμές "μουδιασμένοι" και αυτό οφείλεται στο γεγονός ότι το συστημικό κατεστημένο (δηλαδή τα μεγάλα οικονομικά συμφέροντα που ελέγχουν και το σύνολο των μεγάλων ΜΜΕ πανελλαδικής εμβέλειας), πέτυχε μόνο έναν από τους τέσσερις μεγάλους στόχους που είχε θέσει εξ'αρχής. Μιλώντας με ποδοσφαιρικούς όρους, ουσιαστικά έχασε με σκορ 3-1.   Ο μεγάλος στόχος πο

Study Finds Media Giants New York Times, CNN, and Fox News Pushing for US War in Yemen

by Alan Macleod  Part 2 - Biased Reporting MintPress conducted a study of four leading American outlets: The New York Times , CNN, Fox News and NBC News. Together, these outlets often set the agenda for the rest of the media system and could be said to be a reasonable representation of the corporate media spectrum as a whole. Using the search term “Yemen” in the Dow Jones Factiva global news database, the fifteen most recent relevant articles from each outlet were read and studied, giving a total sample of 60 articles. All articles were published in January 2024 or December 2023. The study found the media wildly distorted reality, presenting a skewed picture that aided U.S. imperial ambitions. For one, every article in the study (60 out of 60) used the word “Houthis” rather than “Ansar Allah” to describe the movement which took part in the Yemeni Revolution of 2011 and rose up against the government in 2014, taking control of the capital Sanaa, becoming the new de facto government. Ma

The truth about Alexei Navalny

Glenn Greenwald / Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp / The Hill /  

Israel Carries Out Most Sadistic Massacre, Opens Fire On Gaza Aid Convoy

Richard Medhurst