Marketing and Progress
The insurance industry started mass-scale data collection in the 1900s, continuing through two world wars. Manufacturers of physical goods looked, in envy, at the reliability of insurance company's actuary tables—businesses desire, above all else, to have a steady, predictable income stream.
Developing a product is a guessing game at best without information about what people will buy. A person or company could spend years creating a new product, sink a lot of money into the process, and not find enough buyers to cover their costs. This problem became acute as manufacturers began adopting Henry Ford's large-scale assembly-line manufacturing.
Now, with demand for the Model T doubling every year, Ford was beginning to perfect the assembly-line production process for which he would one day be known. Already Ford cars were rolling off the factory floor at a rate of more than two hundred a day.[1]
These new methods of building things at scale through the assembly line process were applied to everything during World War I, including ships. Henry Ford built a huge assembly to build ships:
The roof of the open-plan, glass-walled structure hung 100 feet above the floor. It was equipped with a rail system designed to move boats along through the various manufacturing areas, much as Model T cars were moved through the Ford plant in Highland Park. There were three production lines in the plant, each capable of working on up to seven boats at a time.
The keel for the first of the new boats was laid on May 7. An unimaginably quick sixty-four days later Eagle boat number one splashed into the Rouge and began its voyage to the East Coast. A lengthy article in the New York Times called Ford's achievement "extraordinary" and marveled that he had managed to turn out warships "as if they were just so many 'Flivvers.'"[2]
The cleverness of American designers and manufacturers was known throughout the world. American manufacturers could build hundreds of planes a day. A crate of parts dropped out of one of those airplanes could be assembled into a Jeep in less than 10 minutes, fueled, oiled, and driven off.
American manufacturers were building a lot of stuff that needed to be sold. While the two World Wars opened the entire world to American manufacturing—and left every other nation's manufacturing in shambles—someone still had to figure out how to create predictable, consistent demand.
The "disturbing difficulty was the apparent perversity and unpredictability of the prospective customers."[3] This became the "greatest production problem of any country in modern times."[4]
To solve this problem, large companies turned to the nascent field of marketing. Marketers, they thought, could create an ever-expanding marketplace for goods.
The functional goal of national advertising was the creation of desires and habits. In tune with the need for mass distribution that accompanied the development of mass production capabilities, advertising was trying to produce in readers' personal needs.[5]
What the [marketers] are looking for, of course, are the whys of our behavior, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favor (by working with) the fabric of men's minds.[6]
(This is the) first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now.[7]
In the space of a few decades, consumption became production. Marketers used statistics to measure the amount a single person might spend across their lifetime—their productivity—instead of how long they might live and how much they might produce.
Some of the most influential theories about convincing people to buy originate in theories set out and tested between the World Wars and just after World War II.
Sex sells became the catchword. Put a pretty girl in the picture, enjoying the product, and people (not just men) would buy it in droves. Over time, however, marketers and social engineers refined sex sells into something entirely different—the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). Developing more complete theories of human behavior would require more decades of thought and research.
To this point, all these statistics were collected, collated, and calculated by hand—by calculators (primarily women), who were math wizards. Men designed and built, women calculated how to get people (including themselves!) how to buy.
Deeper discoveries and better persuasion techniques required even larger amounts of data and faster calculations.
Larger data sets and faster processing required a machine—like the ones invented to break cipher codes during World War II. As progress fell from favor in the decades after World War II, scientists and engineers were developing tools to replace the human cost of computing the human mind.
[1] Wes Davis, American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023).
[2] Davis.
[3] Vance Packard and Mark Crispin Miller, The Hidden Persuaders (Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2007), 37.
[4] A. J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War (New York: Mariner Books, 2014), 84.
[5] Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, 25th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 37.
[6] Packard and Miller, The Hidden Persuaders, 33.
[7] Eric McLuhan, The Essential McLuhan, ed. Frank Zingrone and Marshall McLuhan (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 21.