Advertisers are figuring out how to invade consumers' sleep and put products into our dreams.
Text | Miao Wei
One day, I saw a sentence on the Internet, which was said by a psychologist: 90% of psychological problems can be solved with money.
I haven't examined its provenance, but I think it's true.
Our existence has to deal with some kind of pain, and money can really help us alleviate a lot of suffering.
In the past, people's way of dealing with suffering was religion, but also philosophy and literature, and then there was technology and entertainment and psychotherapy.
Movie "Master of Hypnosis"
There are about 400 schools of psychotherapy - hypnosis, behaviorist therapy, Gestalt therapy, group therapy, self-affirmation, psychological fusion therapy, etc., we have also been popular here in the past two years, "family row", "mindfulness", etc., "secular pastor" has a huge market gap.
Counseling is treated like a "secular priest," always talking about the noble words of mind, philosophy, and tranquility. But I think the industry should also be looked at from an economic point of view.
Let me tell you three little stories.
1
French psychologist Elisabeth Ludinescu said that in the last decade of his life, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, he was extravagant and miserly, and liked to collect gold bars.
Lacan
Between 1970 and 1980, Lacan received an average of 10 patients per hour, with only a few minutes at a time, and he worked 8 hours a day, 20 days a month, and became a Monopoly when he died.
Lacan himself admits: "I have the success that people want in the economic field, and with supply, I create demand. ”
2
Freud had a nephew named Richard Bernice, who claimed to be the first person in public relations in the United States, and wrote a book called "The Formation of Public Opinion" in 1923, and he served customers such as Procter & Gamble, British American Tobacco, United Fruit Company and so on.
Bernice
When Bernice meets clients, he is willing to talk about his uncle Freud, who describes himself as a psychoanalyst at large companies and helps them solve problems.
He said, I understand the psychological mechanism of the masses, the masses are driven by irrational desires, and if large corporations can use and guide their personal instincts, there will be amazing economic benefits.
A utopian society in which the minds and tastes of the masses are shaped by the elite, and the masses are hinted at what to pursue.
When Bernice was employed by British American Tobacco, he made a very famous case, that is, in the procession of the Easter Parade in New York in 1929, a phalanx of women smoking was arranged, and the women in the phalanx were holding a cigarette and walking on the streets of New York.
Prior to this case, Bernice had paid a special visit to a psychoanalyst who told him that cigarettes were women's "torches of freedom" and that women's desires were suppressed in the modern world, and that they were to raise the torch to rebel.
Bernice's plan was so successful that many newspapers reported smoking women participating in the Easter parade.
Bernice also did two more things for British American Tobacco.
The first thing is to spread pictures of skinny girls smoking, so that women associate thinness with smoking, and if they want to lose weight, they have to smoke.
The second thing, British American Tobacco's "good luck" cigarettes are red and green packaging, market research shows that women do not like green, Bernis encouraged American celebrities to hold a green ball, people who participated in the dance must wear green clothes, there was fundraising at the dance, donations were donated to charity, Bernis associated green with charity, changing women's impression of green.
Roman Holiday, released in 1953
At the beginning of Bernese's special relationship with cigarettes, women who smoked in the United States were only 3%, and at his instigation, the proportion of women who smoked rose to 5%.
If you were to say that all women who smoke are seduced by Bernice, that would obviously overestimate his influence. But Bernis was the first to link smoking to the concept of an independent woman.
A poster of a cigarette product in the Chinese market 100 years ago
Burnes incentivized advertising practitioners to study "incentives" and "deep manipulation" to channel consumers' unconscious desires.
In 1957, a market researcher reported that the appearance of "eating popcorn" and "drinking Coca-Cola" in a movie would increase sales of popcorn and Coca-Cola, which was the beginning of "advertising implants".
Bernice was born in 1891 and died in 1995, living to be 104 years old. There was a British director who made a documentary called "The Century of the Self" with Bernice as the protagonist, and Freud had countless followers, and his nephew Bernice was one of the most remarkable.
3
Bernice's successors are not lacking. Two psychologists recently published an article saying that advertisers are studying how to invade consumers' sleep and put products into our dreams.
Ancient Greeks, sick will go to the temple to sleep, Indians have any discomfort, also like to go to the temple to sleep, hoping to get the revelation of the gods in their dreams.
Movie "The Wandering Earth"
The two psychologists are developing a wearable device that pairs three sleep sensors with a computer or smartphone to prompt users to think about a specific topic in their dreams, and at first their goal is to understand the relationship between psychotherapy and dreams, such as people with PTSD always have nightmares, so how should psychologists interfere with patients' dreams.
Coors Beer has taken a keen interest in their research. One of these two psychologists also writes novels in his spare time, and one of his science fiction works is called "Dream Keeper".
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