Fritz Gehagen - Psychologist and employee of Ernest Dichter: And he said why can't we have a group therapy session about products? And so Dichter built this room up above his garage and he said we can have psychoanalysis of products, they can actually act out and verbalize their wants and needs. And they could be observed and watched and other people could comment and they could talk about it and everybody could join in. He was the first to do this, this was absolutely the first time this was ever done. And he had a movie projector up there where you could show advertisements and people could react to them and he invented the whole technique for mining the unconscious about the hidden psychological wants that people had about products. This became the focus group.
Dichter's breakthrough came with a focus group study he did for Betty Crocker foods. Like many food manufacturers in the early fifties they had invented a new range of instant convenience foods. But although consumers had told market researchers they would welcome the idea in fact they were refusing to buy them. The worst problem was the Betty Crocker cake mix. Dichter did a series of focus groups where housewives free associated about the cake mix. He concluded they felt unconscious guilt about the new image created of ease and convenience.
Bill Schlackman - Psychologist and employee of Ernest Dichter: In other words he had understood that the barrier to the consumption of the product was housewives' feeling of guilt about using it. They basically on one hand wanted to make it easier for themselves but they felt guilty about it. So what you've got to do in those circumstances is remove the barrier, the barrier being guilt. And the way you do that is you give the housewife a greater sense of participation. And how do you do that? By adding an egg. As simple as that.