The Happiness Industry Read Online Free PDF Page A

clients in the government and private sector. It didn’t take much to help it spread to Madison Avenue and beyond, although the journey was accelerated by an event of professional disgrace. In the period after World War One, Watson was a highly celebrated academic at Johns Hopkins University, winning large research grants and pay rises. But in1920, it emerged that he’d been having an affair with a young graduate student and assistant, Rosalie Rayner. 20 Unfortunately for him, the Rayners were a revered Maryland family, who had made generous donations to Johns Hopkins. News of the affair spread fast, making national newspapers, which even published a letter between Watson and Rayner.
    Given the somewhat nihilistic view of human nature that underpinned Watson’s research agenda, some observers could not help but make a connection. His colleague, Adolf Meyer, who would later exert a powerful influence over the American psychiatric profession, was of this view:
I cannot help seeing in the whole matter a practical illustration of the lack of responsibility to have a definite philosophy, the implications of not recognising meanings, the emphasis on the emancipation of science from ethics. 21
    Watson, evidently, had failed to avoid ‘responding’ to the physical ‘stimulus’ represented by Rosalie Rayner, but behaviourism did not cut it as a defence. Johns Hopkins forced him out, and he left Baltimore for New York.
    By 1920, the advertising industry was fully alert to the potential riches offered by psychology. At the forefront of this movement was the Madison Avenue firm J. Walter Thompson (JWT), whose president at the time, Stanley Resor, pledged to turn his business into a ‘university of advertising’. ‘Scientific advertising’ was all the rage. Resor was especially bullish about the emerging possibilities. ‘Advertising’, he argued, ‘is educational work, mass education’. The great advertising campaigns of the future would send messages directly to their passive recipients, who would respond accordingly in their shopping habits.What this new ‘university’ needed were the scientists to provide them with the data on how to do this.
    Resor was specifically seeking someone who could advise them on the psychology of ‘appeal’, believing that successful ads triggered that particular emotional response. Perhaps recognizing that he needed a scholar of flexible morals, he initially contacted another recently disgraced academic, William I. Thomas, who had been kicked out of the University of Chicago sociology department for his own extramarital affair. Thomas viewed Madison Avenue as too grubby a business, so he passed them on to Watson, a personal friend of his. Resor had found his man.
    That same year, Watson joined JWT as an account executive, on a salary four times what he was earning at Johns Hopkins. As part of the new position, he had to undergo some training, including travelling the backwaters of Tennessee, trying to sell coffee, and working several months behind the counter at Macy’s in New York. With that out of the way, he was free to start applying his behaviourist doctrines to the design of advertising campaigns, and advising his JWT colleagues on how to trigger the right responses.
    The most crucial thing for advertisers to remember, Watson implored his colleagues, was that they are not selling a product at all, but seeking to produce a psychological response. The product is simply a vehicle with which to do this, along with the advertising campaign. Consumers can be conditioned to do anything if the environmental factors are designed in the right way. Don’t appeal to the consumer’s existing emotions and desires, Watson urged, but trigger new ones . As part of a contract with Johnson & Johnson, he explored ways of marketing washing powder in terms of the emotions experienced by mothers, such as anxiety,fear and the desire for