Manufacturing Desire

The science of wanting things

By the 1950s, American advertising had stopped guessing what people wanted and started studying it — clinically. This chapter is about that shift, the book that exposed it to a mass audience, and the one part of that book's legacy that turned out to be more myth than fact.

Packard's actual argument

Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) documented advertisers' growing reliance on "motivational research" — depth-psychology techniques borrowed from psychoanalysis, including small-sample clinical-style interviews and projective tests, aimed at uncovering consumer motivations people couldn't or wouldn't articulate in an ordinary survey.¹ Packard's most memorable examples hold up under a direct read of the book. Housewives given instant cake mixes that required only adding water reported feeling vaguely guilty, as though they hadn't really baked anything — manufacturers reformulated the mix to require an added egg, restoring a sense of genuine contribution, and sales improved. Separately, motivational researcher Ernest Dichter's automobile studies reportedly found that convertibles drew men into showrooms as a fantasy purchase — something like a symbolic mistress — while the car actually driven home was almost always the practical sedan, a finding that shaped how showrooms were laid out and how convertibles were marketed even to buyers who'd never seriously consider owning one.²

The myth Packard didn't actually create

Here's the correction most retellings of this book get wrong: Packard is popularly remembered as the man who exposed subliminal advertising — hidden messages flashed too fast to consciously perceive, supposedly compelling audiences to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola. That claim belongs to a different, separate 1957 event: James Vicary's announcement that he'd flashed "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" messages during a movie screening and measured a concession-stand sales jump. Packard's own book treats this claim with open skepticism rather than endorsement — his chapter directly examining motivational research's validity doesn't even discuss Vicary's specific experiment, and elsewhere Packard is explicit that the field's methods (sample sizes as small as 200 people, inconsistent interpretation of projective tests) fell well short of rigorous science. Vicary himself later admitted, in an interview years afterward, that he'd fabricated the data entirely — there was no real experiment behind the popcorn claim.³ The book that's remembered as the proof of subliminal manipulation is, on a direct read, more skeptical of that idea than the popular retelling gives it credit for. Later historians examining motivational research's actual influence have gone further, arguing Dichter's methods were less rigorous and less widely adopted in real advertising practice than Packard's narrative suggested, and that the field had mostly faded from serious advertising research by the 1970s.⁴

None of this means the underlying phenomenon — advertising engineered to work on people below the level of conscious deliberation — isn't real. It means the specific "hidden messages you can't consciously detect" version of that story is largely folklore, while the more mundane version — studying unconscious anxieties and designing products and pitches to resolve them — is the one that's actually documented.

Veblen: the older, harder argument

Six decades before Packard, economist Thorstein Veblen had already described a version of manufactured desire that didn't need any hidden psychological trickery at all. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen argued that a great deal of consumption is "conspicuous" — undertaken not for the goods' use but as visible evidence of the ability to waste time and money that others can't afford to waste. He paired this with "conspicuous leisure" (visibly not working, as proof of status) and grounded both in what he called "pecuniary emulation" — status ranked and pursued through comparison with those one rank above, an "invidious comparison" that has no natural stopping point, since there's always another rank above the one just reached.⁵ Veblen's argument is more precise than the pop-summary "people buy things to show off" — the point isn't display for its own sake, but display of waste specifically, since only visible waste proves you have more than you need.

Keeping up with a real family named Jones

The phrase most people use to describe Veblen's dynamic — "keeping up with the Joneses" — has its own real, documented origin, and it's not the one sometimes attached to it. A persistent myth claims the phrase referenced novelist Edith Wharton's wealthy family; that story appears to have surfaced only after Wharton's death in 1937, with no contemporary support, and should be treated as invented. The actual source is a comic strip by Arthur R. "Pop" Momand, which debuted in 1913 in the New York Globe (the New York World picked it up later for wider syndication, which likely explains why some retellings credit the wrong paper). Momand said the strip was based on his own and his wife's real overspending trying to match their wealthier neighbors in Cedarhurst, Long Island — he'd considered calling it "Keeping Up with the Smiths" before deciding "Joneses" sounded better.⁶ A real family's real financial strain, turned into a syndicated punchline, became the culture's shorthand for exactly the dynamic Veblen had already described academically fifteen years earlier.

Where Plenee fits

Whether the mechanism is Dichter's depth interviews, Veblen's invidious comparison, or a comic strip that happened to name the right feeling, the target is the same: spending decisions made to resolve someone else's anxiety or someone else's status contest, not your own stated goals. Plenee's Extra FLOW framing exists partly for this reason — separating what a budget actually needs from what it discretionarily spends makes manufactured wants visible as a category, rather than invisible inside "just what I spend." Seeing a discretionary line item for what it is doesn't make comparison-driven spending wrong; it makes it a choice instead of a reflex.