Retail Therapy
Sex and advertising
Retail therapy
How Ernest Dichter, revolutionised marketing
Liviu Alexandru Silvasan
Organizational Behaviour, Semester I, MBA I
Prof. Dr. Radu Baltasiu
February 7, 2013
Retail Therapy
What is retail therapy and what does it stand for: mainly we are now associating shoping to a therapy, thanks to how shopping is now viewed and how we perceive it. If anyone has ever wondered why does he like to buy a particular type of shoes or why she preferes a specific lipstick, let’s say, or she wonders for hours in a ’’special shop’’ this is thanks to what marketing has been doing for quite a long time now. ’’We buy things we don't need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons’’. Nowadays, we take for granted that, also, we like to shop for pleasure, but there has been an entire revolution going on in order for us to act like this. Some people, made themselves noticed and actively participated in changing the way we buy and when we buy.
Most of the changes accomplished in sales and let’s say, the revolution in how to get where we are today are due to all sorts of motivational research. If we also reffered to people, Ernest Dichter was an Austrian Jewish, later American psychologist and marketing specialist which is known as the father of motivational research. “Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace’’ . Dichter managed to manipulate the consumer’s brain, to an extent, to which today we don’t seem to care that this has happened and that now we take it as if it’s natural. The approach was not unlike therapy, with Dichter mining the responses for encoded, unconscious motives and desires.
What is the role of sex in advertising? Dichter also managed to associate sex and consumption and offered sollutions for selling products by finding out...
