I Wanted To Watch Ted Koppel, But All I Could Find Was Nancy Grace and Entertainment Tonight

We’re in the business of selling audiences to advertisers. They [the sponsors] come to us asking for women 18 – 49 and adults 25 – 54 and we try to deliver.
Robert Niles, NBC VP of Marketing

In an earlier blog, I reviewed some of the social class theory developed in the 1950-60s to help better understand my parents, neighbors, and the families we grew up in within what were extremely homogenous, lily white suburbs of East Dallas. In the new millennium, social class is much harder to define. Whereas Herbert J. Gans in The Levittowners could provide some fairly salient generalizations about marriage, family life, parenting attitudes, and civic participation of blue collar, lower middle class, upper middle class, etc., today categories of age, income, ethnic background and educational level can explain less.

Here’s a quick assessment of how one might be classified today for the purposes of consumer marketing demographics. This online assessment only takes a minute and provides immediate results.

http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/presurvey.shtml

I come in as an Innovator (Actualizer), Thinker (Fulfilled).
http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/types.shtml

The following is a description of the VALS categories by James B. Twitchell in Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture, 1996. He is more entertaining than the SRIC website in his descriptions, though his book is a bit dated.

The psychographic system of SRI is called acronymically VALS, short for Values and Lifestyle System. Essentially this schematic is based on the commonsense view that consumers are motivated "to acquire products, services, and experiences that provide satisfaction and give shape, substance, and character to their identities" in bundles. The more "resources" (namely, money, but health, self-confidence, and energy also figure) each group of consumers has, the more likely they are to buy the "products, services, and experiences" of the group with which they associate. But resources are not the only determinant. We are also motivated by such ineffables as principles, status, and action. When SRI describes these various audiences, they peel apart like this (I have provided them with an appropriate car to show their differences):

Actualizers [Changed to Innovators in the current VALS terminology]. These people at the top of the pyramid are the ideal of everyone except advertisers. They have "it" already or will soon. They are sophisticated take-charge people interested in independence and character. They don't need new things; in fact, they already have their things. If not, they already know what the finer things are and refuse to be told. They don't need a new car, but if they do, they'll read Consumer Reports. They do not need a hood ornament on their car.

Fulfilled [Changed to Thinkers in the current VALS terminology]. Here are mature, satisfied, comfortable souls who support the status quo. Often they are literally or figuratively retired. They value functionality, durability, and practicality. They drive something called a town car, which is made by all the big auto makers.

Believers. As the word expresses, these people support traditional codes of family, church, and community, wearing good Republican cloth coats. As consumers they are predictable, favoring American products and recognizable brands. They regularly attend church and Wal-Mart [buying Chinese goods if they are a value], and they are transported there in a mid-range automobile like an Oldsmobile. Whether Oldsmobile likes it or not, they do indeed drive "your father's Oldsmobile." [Can't find Olds anymore; better buy a Buick.]

Achievers. If consumerism has an ideal, it is achievers. Cha-ching, goes the cash register. Wedded to job as a source of duty, reward, and prestige, these are the people who not only favor the establishment, they are the establishment. They like the concept of prestige. They demonstrate their success by buying such objects as prestigious cars. They like hood ornaments.

Strivers. Young strivers are fine; they may mature into achievers. But old strivers can be nasty; they may well be bitter. Because they are unsure of themselves, young strivers are eager to be branded so long as the brand is elevating. Money defines success and they don't have enough of it. Being a yuppie is fine as long as the prospect of upward mobility looms. Strivers like foreign cars even if it means only leasing one.

Experiencers. Here is life on the edge--enthusiastic, impulsive, and even reckless. Their energy finds expression in sports, social events, and "doing something." Politically and personally uncommitted, experiencers are an advertising dream come true, because they see consumption as fulfillment and are willing to spend a high percentage of their disposable income to attain it. When you wonder who could possibly care how quickly a car will accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour, it is the Experiencers.

Makers. Here is the practical side of Experiencers; Makers like to build things and they experience the world by working on it. Conservative, suspicious, respectful,
they like to do things in and to their homes, like adding a room, canning vegetables, or changing the oil in their pickup trucks.

Strugglers. Like Actualizers, these people are outside the pale of Adcult, not by choice but by economics. Strugglers are chronically poor. Their repertoire of things is limited because they have so little. Although they clip coupons like Actualizers, theirs are from the newspaper, not from bonds. Their transportation is usually public, if at all.

The categories are very fluid, of course, and we may move through as many as three of them in our lifetimes. So, for instance, from ages eighteen to twenty-four most people (61 percent) are Experiencers in desire or deed whereas fewer than 1 percent are Fulfilled. Between ages fifty-five and sixty-four, however, the Actualizers, Fulfilled, and Strugglers claim about 15 percent of the population each, whereas the Believers have settled out at about a fifth. The Achievers, Strivers, and Makers fill about 10 percent apiece, with the remaining 2 percent Experiencers. The numbers can be broken down at every stage, allowing for marital status, education, household
size, dependent children, home ownership, household income, and occupation.

So I can understand that as an Actualizer, Thinker (and Maker in the making) and old, overeducated semi-retiree, I should not expect anyone to program television, radio, movies or periodicals for me, since I rarely buy anything. It should be no surprise to me that I find the mass media to be a great wasteland. But I’m not complaining. I actually like Nancy Grace on occasions. I understand there are millions of overworked, underpaid, big-spending, young moms who deserve a break in the evening to see some tabloid titillation and pervert perps brought to justice. And only in America can old nonspenders like me still find plenty to entertain ourselves with given that there is so little to find within the media.

A Reinhardt of the Mind Poetry Corner

Epistle To Be Left In The Earth
by Archibald MacLeish




...It is colder now
there are many stars
we are drifting
North by the Great Bear
the leaves are falling
The water is stone in the scooped rocks
to southward
Red sun grey air
the crows are
Slow on their crooked wings
the jays have left us
Long since we passed the flares of Orion
Each man believes in his heart he will die
Many have written last thoughts and last letters
None know if our deaths are now or forever
None know if this wandering earth will be found

We lie down and the snow covers our garments
I pray you
you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names
I will tell you all we have learned
I will tell you everything
The earth is round
there are springs under the orchards
The loam cuts with a blunt knife
beware of
Elms in thunder
the lights in the sky are stars
We think they do not see
we think also
The trees so not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us
The birds too are ignorant
do not listen
Do not stand at dark in the open windows
We before you have heard this
they are voices
They are not words at all but the wind rising
Also none among us has seen God
(... We have thought often
the flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous
The wind changes at night and the dreams come

It is very cold
there are strange stars near Arcturus
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky

Magic in the Postmodern World

From Adcult USA, James B. Twitchell, 1996, Columbia University Press.

The magi were the ancient Zoroastrian theurgists whose actions animated the universe. They were the ones who knew the buried codes. Little wonder, then, that it was members of this caste who traveled to Jerusalem to bear witness to one of their own--the Christ child, the new and improved magus. And little wonder that the modern magi are in advertising around the globe, adding "value" to interchangeable objects. They make disposable goods into long-lasting charms. It is the ad execs who produce Budweiser beer trucks in the middle of the desert, transform monsters into gentlemen hulks with a spray of Right Guard, activate those cute scrubbing brushes for Dow Cleanser, put a smile on the pitcher of Kool Aid, change a deep-swimming shark into a Chevrolet Baretta, and make millions of pimples disappear in the mirror . . . like magic. . . .

How do we think things work if not through the powers of magic? Why should we think that ours is an age of reason, an age of scientific observation, an age devoid of wishful thinking? The days of the Inquisition, Ponzi schemes, rain dances, the South Sea Bubble, witchcraft, and Dutch tulip mania are hardly over. In their place we have the stock market, state-supported gambling, chain letters, abstract expressionism, credit cards, national debt, filter tips, premium gas, anorexia, vitamin supplements, Amway, Lourdes, horoscopes, social security, trickle-down economics, leveraged buyouts, long-range weather forecasting, higher education, installment buying, the rhythm method, UFOs, hedge funds, eat-more-but-lose diets, the value of diamonds, astrology, prayer, [blogster emendation: blow jobs that lead to impeachment; smart bombs aimed at Bin Laden; removing shoes at airport security; launching war against terrorism; Internet pornography growing within the ghost of the dot.com bust; no-down-payment, no-principal-payment, adjustable home loans; Enron stock; thirst for democracy; vicarious TV life with sports stars and other celebrities as well as news programming aimed at the buying middle-aged woman's concern about sex perverts; 401Ks to replace pensions; U.S. Corps of Engineers levees and dams; paying $1,000 a year out-of-pocket for Pfizer's Lipitor to prevent sudden death from heart attack; voting in the 2008 Presidential elections] language, and, of course, almost all advertising. Economists like John Kenneth Galbraith make careers by pointing out how American economic culture is based on various pipe dreams, but they also forget that without the magic of these dream worlds we would not have "reality."

The Soul of Sliced Bread and Breakfast Cereal

An area where psychoanalysis still holds sway is eating disorder therapy. Moms can transfer neurosis to children through the way they manage the child’s diet. I have no particular knowledge of the intricacies of this problem--I’m fortunate to have not been touched myself or within my close family by this disease--but in reading Ernest Dichter’s marketing research, I have a new interest in how my mother managed her kitchen.

I think my mom was fairly tidy in her packaging of my school lunchbox, but there were times I could tell she was falling in a rut. After three straight months of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips, I was bored to death with lunch. I think we came to a mutual agreement that it would be better for us both if she just gave me a lunch allowance to eat from the school cafeteria.

According to Dichter in Handbook of Consumer Motivations (he’s writing about 1950s homemakers) moms take special care in packing their children’s school lunches. “Food wrappings are a demonstration of the concern and affection in which the members of the family are held. . . .Women respondents wrapped the package in a certain way to make sure that it was secure. Many women would run their hand over it. They would do it several times. It was as if they could seal the wrap by the magic of touch. Among other respondents it was noted that when they had finished wrapping an item, they tended to square the package. These homemakers felt that the better the shape of the package was, the more securely it was wrapped.”

Through my mother’s example, I have always had brand loyalty to Mrs. Baird’s white bread. It’s been banned from my home for twenty years or so as an empty carb food, but if I were to buy a loaf of white bread, I would buy Mrs. Baird’s.

Anyone who grew up in the Dallas area knows that Mrs. Baird was a grandmother who baked bread and delivered it in a buggy. Many of us children toured a Mrs. Baird’s baking plant as a field trip within scouts or some similar children’s activity. We remember the wonderful aroma of the plant and getting to eat a slice from a fresh baked loaf covered in melted butter.

The Baird boys, I’m sure, had a marketing department that helped establish the “image” (Dichter’s term) of the product. They were pleased with the nostalgic grandma image and also approved and maintain today the advertising line that Mrs. Baird’s “continues the tradition of hand twisting each loaf of bread, a special commitment to quality.” According to one Dichter study, consumers “preferred bakeries where workers did touch the dough and where the bakers acted as if they were baking bread for themselves at home.” Robotic man hygienically covered to prevent his germs from contaminating food product at Lubbock Mrs. Baird's plant

Mrs. Baird’s is now owned by Bimbo Bakeries. I can imagine the owners eating lunch at their country club and fretting over the regional baking business. My recommendation to them is that they buy machines to twist the bread, give the poor man above a decent job, and lay off several of their marketing dick executives to pay for it.

The sale to Bimbo was tied to misbehavior of Vernon and Carroll--Ninnie would have been ashamed of them. http://www.answers.com/topic/mrs-baird-s-bakeries?cat=biz-fin

Other fifties moms preferred breads like Wonder Bread and Sunbeam that promised energy from space-age nutrients. Breakfast foods, too, promised powerful ingredients to provide strength. Regarding breakfast, my mom fit Dichters’s observation that at breakfast not only do we need to “replenish the sources of our bodily energy physically,” but psychologically, breakfast is “ a rehearsal for coming battles, a stocktaking of our resources and a tuning of our senses to the world at large.” We want crunchy cereals because we “look upon breakfast as a sort of adversary that has to be conquered.” For those of a less pugilistic spirit (I’m one of these), we prefer crunchy cereals rather than mushy soft cereals because crunchy cereals “fulfill our tactile curiosity. You can play with cereals in an oral fashion. They have interesting shapes that can be cracked with a snap, crackle and pop.”

Kellogg's Frosted Flakes' endorsement by Superman matches Nike's use of Michael Jordan, but probably at a much smaller cost.

For more about the gender of cereals and sandwiches, including Rice Krispies, see this article.

According to Dichter, "the future trend will not be a supermodern pattern of “atom-powered” cereals. The truly modern cereal will combine all the warmth and affection of the substantial old-fashioned cereal with the fun, lightness, and convenience of modern dry cereal.” (He was right on target here.)

Many of the fifties families in my neighborhood could be classified as lower middle class restrictive or lower middle class expansive. (Click here to see previous blog on fifties suburban social classes.) Use of sugar at breakfast may be a litmus test of our families’ social class. According to Dichter, “sugar is a conflict product. We need it and want it and at the same time we are often afraid of it. . . . Every time the housewife reaches for a package of sugar, . . . she is subject to conflicting feelings of varying intensity.” Moms can basically be classified as sugar hedonists, sugar moderates, or sugar puritans.

I commend my mother (who has never had a weight problem) for being a sugar hedonist, but doing it in such a way that it was no big psychological deal. Despite her Twinkie- and cookie- and Coke-filled cupboards, I’ve always been able to stay away with no effort from all sugar-based, refined products.

We Thought We Were Providing Our Children With Paradise, and They Found It To Be Hell

Mine was not always a happy childhood, and I sometimes blamed my parents for selecting our family home in the bland, sterile neighborhoods of Casa View. If I were asked, “What would have been the right and best place to grow up?,” I would have stumbled in confusion. Perhaps an extended rather than a nuclear family, in neighborhoods reflecting the range of diversity in races, ethnicity, and income levels. Where everything was not new—such as in a dense city with a history of place and with a long development of commercial and social systems. Or perhaps on a farm, close to nature and exempt from consumer shopping and materialist concerns. Or in a place where there were not so many kids banging up against one another in overcrowded schools.

Herbert Gans, in The Levittowners,(1967) points out that nonsuburban types of homeplaces had their owns sorts of unpleasantness.

Yet even though Levittowners and other lower middle class Americans continue to be home-centered, they are much more “in the world” than their parents and grandparents were. Those coming out of ethnic working class backgrounds have rejected the “amoral familism” which pits every family against every other in the struggle to survive and the ethnocentrism which made other cultures and even neighborhoods bitter enemies. This generation trusts its neighbors, participates with them in social and civic activities, and no longer sees government as inevitably corrupt. Even working class Levittowners have begun to give up the suspicion that isolated their ancestors from all but family and childhood friends. Similarly, the descendants of rural Protestant America have given up the xenophobia that turned previous generations against the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, they have almost forgotten the intolerant Puritanism which triggered attacks against pleasure and enjoyment, and they no longer fully accept the doctrine of laissez faire that justifies the defense of individual rights and privileges against others’ needs. . . . These and other changes have come about not because people are not better or more tolerant human beings, but because they are affluent. For the Levittowners, life is not a fight for survival anymore.

When it came time to find a homeplace for my own brood of four children, my wife and I picked a small, college town. For many years, we lived within a block of the downtown courthouse square. Residents in our neighborhoods were of diverse backgrounds. The smalltown community, and the nearby large cities, provided abundant social and cultural capital. We later moved a bit out of town to a 1912 farmhouse, with farm animals, and thousands of acres of parkland. All proved boring to my brood.

So it goes that, according to my kids, I failed them just as my parents failed me. By the age of 18, my daughter was dead set that she was going to get out of her boring hometown and never come back. My son, attending his tenth year high school reunion recently, remarked on the general contempt many of the graduates (those who had moved to other parts of the country) felt toward their hometown.

Jesus, If Market Researchers Can Figure Out Motivation, Why Don’t Just Rule The World?

The infamous Virgina Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho was analyzed by the media and its experts from many points of view, including psychoanalysis. Psychologists and psychiatrists disagreed concerning whether the best diagnosis for Cho was autism, Aspergers, or paranoid schizophrenia. Some of a psychoanalytic bent explored Cho from the viewpoint that he might have been a repressed homosexual. In response to various speculations about Cho’s psychosexual problems, one writer commented that (in 2007) psychoanalysis is an unproven and discarded theory.

If I were forced to read today book after book of psychoanalytic theory, I would be bored to tears, in part because I would find speculation after speculation to be lacking in scientific proof but also unable to subjectively ring true to my understanding of myself and the people around me.

I do find today some benefit from reading books that contain psychoanalytic speculations on my motivations toward consumer products. Whatever their orientation, most psychoanalysts writing during the first half of the twentieth century were shooting from the hip with little accuracy, missing their mark as often as hitting it. The researchers on the individual’s relationship with inanimate objects, that is consumer goods such as autos, soaps, toothpaste, and cake mixes, used methodologies that would hardly pass muster in any graduate level university research program today.

The leading depth boy or the 1940s-1960s, Ernest Dichter, was trained under some of the best scholars of pre-war Vienna. Psychoanalysis was not taught and even banned as a subject of discussion in the university program he attended. But as a sort of sideline, he did go through analysis and practice for a short time as a therapist.

In the U.S. for his corporate clients, Dichter approached each project with a variety of study approaches, usually a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. He basically invented the use of focus groups as a technique of marketing research. He is credited with making first use of the term “image” to describe the important brand qualities that must be developed to distinguish commodities.

In earlier blogs, I’m mentioned many of his insights. Here’s a few more worthy of consideration.

--Why do cake mixes usually require that an egg be added?
The manufacturers could easily include the egg or a substitute as part of the dry mixture.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.cooking-chat/msg/e4ae9f3134d5b3c4
http://books.google.com/books?id=yzIm-oJyXNkC&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=dichter+%22cake+mix%22+egg&source=web&ots=aJyER84A-O&sig=KSSzDEX71YDe7P0DZM5ujqPJlQo
Dichter found housewives have a need to put a cook’s touch to the cake. An egg is a symbol of fertility.

from Dichter's Handbook, 1964

Baking provides a feeling of love and security. Aroma and odors pervading the house when mother was baking are fondly remembered. The most fertile moment occurs when the woman pulls the finished cake, bread loaf, or other baked product out of the oven. In a sense it is like giving birth. How did it turn out? Did it fulfill expectations? Once the baked product is placed before the family a good part of the interest of the housewife has been lost.

--Who buys new automobiles and why?
Ernest Dichter’s research for the auto industry set the tone for much fifties and sixties advertising. In a previous blog, I have mentioned several of his findings—that people have fond memories of their first cars, that cars are an expression of freedom and independence for housewives. The commercial from the previous blog is scripted from Dichter’s playbook—that wives usually make the final purchase decision. Dichter also found that car owners associate a car whose doors close firmly and securely with a well made vehicle. Americans also have a mystical attachment to family road trips.

--Who drank my dad’s Chivas Regal?

According to Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction, 1973

Market research on Scotch drinkers revealed that individuals who drink Chivas Regal rarely serve it to friends. At best, these scotch drinkers, even those at the very high income level of over $25,000 per year, will keep Chivas Regal for only their bery best friends, clients, or special guests whom they are trying to impress. Chivas drinkers usually keep less expensive brands of Scotch around the house for general guests or casual or lower station visitors.

Key, a notorious quack, paranoid, and pervert [who sees vaginas, penises and the word “Sex” in anything, but especially advertising], goes on to analyze that the ad above actually contains the subliminal picture of a dog (man’s best friend) which is intended to provide an unconscious stimulation to the purchase of alcohol.

--Jesus, If Focus Groups and Opinion Polls Can Figure Out Motives, Why Don’t Just Rule The World?

From The Assault on Reason, Al Gore, 2007

After a long and detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my campaign made a recommendation and predication that surprises me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many “points” [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to this response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent. Though pleased, or course, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.

When Baby Boomers Meet their Maker

I hope that entire industries must review their work products at the pearly gates.

I think the logistics boys—those whose careers have consisted of engineering smart distribution of products—will make it to heaven. They’ve done much to keep prices low during the last several decades.

And I think the bomb engineers may have a chance. When Ike or MacArthur pushed the button, they would indiscriminately kill tens of thousands. With smart bombs, Bill Clinton and George Bush can at least keep the target relatively small.

Everyone who has had anything to do with the U.S. chemical industry likely will go to hell, especially those chemists in white lab jackets who create the ingredients to packaged household goods such as insecticides, herbicides, detergents, beauty products, over-the-counter drugs, and packaged foodstuffs. I’m sure there are worse villains among the ranks of the Dow Chemicals and Procter and Gambles of the world, but the group in charge of consumer products have left whole continents of toxic waste behind them.

The hardware and software engineers likely will make it in. With Hollywood, the U.S. computer industry has been a key to the country’s maintenance of trade balances and prosperity.

Each Hollywood producer, director, and actor will have to state his case individually to St. Peter. The group working in this scene from Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing Charm School likely will make it in.

And also all dance instructors, including Mrs. Keeling, will find their places in heaven.