While the psychology of consumer behavior would veer off into a number of different directions in the 1950s, its core remained psychoanalytic theory brought over from Europe in the 1930s. Nothing happened by chance in the human mind, the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, had put forth. It was this idea that explained why marketers believed they had to probe consumers’ minds for the less-than-obvious.
Not only was each “psychic event” meaningful in some way, according to Freud, but each one was also determined by those preceding it, suggesting there was a certain logic even to the irrational. Unconscious thoughts were as significant, frequent, and normal as conscious ones in the universe of psychoanalysis, making them just as valuable to marketers as to therapists in terms of understanding people’s behavior.
It was ironic that psychologists of Freud’s own time considered his theories so strange when they became so popular with experts and laypeople alike in postwar America. “Thought” was strictly a conscious concept to psychologists a century ago when for Freud much of the activity of the human mind was unconscious.
Such unorthodox views made Freud persona non grata at universities until the........