A Fifties Family Makes an Impulse Buy

The Madison Avenue men made some advertising that rises to art.


Apparently, in the late fifites, Chevrolet made some big-budget two-minute ads that attempted to tell a story. After all, what kind of story can you tell in 30 seconds or one minute?

I'm not sure what impact motivational researchers had on this commercial, but the production team did an masterful job with casting and direction. I wish I had had this woman for a mom. She is sexy and also practical, showing concern for the family budget. The dad is generous and sensitive, just like a fifties dad was supposed to be, and just like my dad.

Ernest Dichter did much to help fifties families overcome their puritanical restraints and jump on the bandwagon of the juggernaut of the U.S. economy of the fifties and sixties.

He can be forgiven for being part of that fifties-sixties delusion, idiosyncratic to American culture, that the new “social sciences” had methodology that would have real effectiveness--to accurately predict human behavior. Packard and Friedan apparently were under the same delusion (with a paranoid strain), with their neat stories of marketing problem, psychologist recommendation and success. It’s unfortunate that that early arrogance of the social “sciences” became institutionalized in our universities and their academic departments. Many of the advertising men understood all along that they were creating art and fantasy. The Dichters of the world found easy marks in the corporate “organization men” who controlled advertising budgets. Psychoanalysis is a tool amazingly versatile in its range for explanation, but it is hardly a science. More about "The Organization Men" in future posts.