Wanting Things You Didn't Before? how the desire is manufactured

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 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. Small-sample clinical-style interviews and projective tests, aimed at uncovering motivations people couldn't or wouldn't articulate in an ordinary survey.¹

His most memorable examples hold up under a direct read. Housewives given instant cake mixes that needed only 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. That finding 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 create

Here's the correction most retellings 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 1957 event entirely: James Vicary's announcement that he'd flashed "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coca-Cola" during a film screening and measured a jump in concession sales.

Packard's own book treats this with open skepticism rather than endorsement. The chapter examining motivational research's validity doesn't even discuss Vicary's 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 afterwards, that he'd fabricated the data entirely. There was no experiment behind the popcorn claim.³

So the book remembered as proof of subliminal manipulation is, on a direct read, more skeptical of that idea than its reputation suggests. Later historians have gone further, arguing Dichter's methods were less rigorous and less widely adopted in real advertising practice than Packard's narrative implied, and that the field had mostly faded from serious advertising research by the 1970s.⁴

None of this means the underlying phenomenon isn't real. Advertising engineered to work below conscious deliberation is real. It means the specific "hidden messages you can't detect" version is largely folklore, while the 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 described a version of manufactured desire that needed no 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 being able 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.

He grounded both in what he called "pecuniary emulation" — status ranked and pursued by comparison with those one rank above. He called it an "invidious comparison", and it has no natural stopping point, because 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. It's display of waste specifically — because only visible waste proves you have more than you need.

Keeping up with a real family named Jones

The phrase most people use for Veblen's dynamic has its own documented origin, and it isn't 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 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 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 named the right feeling, the target is the same: spending decisions made to resolve someone else's anxiety or someone else's status contest, rather than your own stated goals.

Plenee's Extra FLOW framing exists partly for this. Separating what a budget actually needs from what it chooses to spend 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.

The takeaway

Advertising's mid-century turn toward psychological research was real, and some findings — the cake mix, the convertible as fantasy — are well documented. Its most famous myth, subliminal mind control, is not: the book blamed for it was skeptical of the claim, and the man behind it later admitted he made it up. The older, better-evidenced mechanism is Veblen's — status pursued through visible waste, with no natural stopping point. A dynamic so recognisable that a New York cartoonist turned his own family's version of it into the phrase everyone still uses.