Promotional Clip: This is The Institute for Motivational Research, a place devoted to the intriguing business of finding out why people behave as they do. Why they buy as they do. Why they respond to advertising as they do. And this is Dr. Ernest Dichter. "We don't go out and ask directly why do you buy and why don't you, what we try to do instead is try to understand the total personality, the self image of the customer; we use all the resources of modern social sciences. It opens up some stimulating psychological techniques for selling any new product.
Like the other psychoanalysts Dichter believed that American citizens were fundamentally irrational beings; they could not be trusted. Their real reasons for buying products were rooted in unconscious desires and feelings. And Dichter wanted to find ways to uncover what he called 'the secret self' of the American consumer.
Fritz Gehagen - Psychologist and employee of Ernest Dichter: He was trying to get out of people's mind the unconscious motivations that they had for purchasing. These could be sexual, they could be psychological, they could be sociological, they could be a demand for status a demand for recognition. There were things that people couldn't verbalize or wouldn't verbalize because they were too secret to them, they were a part of their nature, and they would be embarrassed if they came out and said things like this.
Hedy Dichter - Ernest Dichter's wife: He would interview people but not ask them direct questions but let them talk freely like you do in psychoanalysis, and that was his background.