Philip Gould - New Labor Strategy Advisor Election Campaign 1997 - I don't see the focus group as some marketing tool I see the focus group as a way of hearing what the people have to say. And I see the focus group as a way to a new form of politics. 1997 was I think fundamentally important in that I think it is the end of elitist politics that has dominated Britain for so much of the last hundred years.
In 1939 Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew created a vision of a future world in which the consumer was king. It was at the World's Fair in New York and Bernays called it Democracity. It was one of the earliest and most dramatic portrayals of a consumerist democracy. A society in which the needs and desires of individuals were read and fulfilled by business in the free market.
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public Relations - The World's Fair created a spectacle in which all of these concerns were met and they met by Westinghouse and General Motors and the American Cash Register Company and company after company presented itself as the sort of centerpiece of a society in which human desire and human want and human anxiety would all be responded to and it would all be met purely through the free enterprise system. There was this sort of notion that the free market was something not guided by ideologies or by political power, it was something that was simply guided by the people's will.