PR created consumerism – what can it do for sustainability?

One of the major changes in the last century has been the rise of the consumer. But this isn't something that just happened – the consumer was created, and the way it happened is an important lesson in engaging people on sustainable business.

The key figure in this story is Edward Bernays. Not someone I was particularly familiar with until Adam Curtis's brilliant Century of Self on BBC4 a few years ago. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He combined his uncle's work on unconscious desires with thinking on crowd psychology to influence the masses. His basic idea was that human behaviour is driven more by emotion than by logic and that by harnessing that emotion at a group level you could get people to do what you wanted them to do. In his book, Propaganda, he said: "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?"

He developed his approach during the first world war when he was helping the American propaganda effort. In peacetime he saw the opportunity to convert this expertise in mass persuasion to the markets.

Having understandably renamed his approach Public Relations (PR), one of his first major campaigns was getting women to smoke. At the time it was socially unacceptable for women to be seen with a cigarette. That meant half the number of potential customers for The American Tobacco Company. So Bernays arranged for a group of rich debutants to light up simultaneously during the 1929 Easter Day Parade. He saw that it was news, not advertising, that would get the message to the people and told the press that there was going to be a protest that day on "lighting the torch of freedom". It was this phrase that hit the headlines – squarely positioning smoking with female independence and liberty. From that moment on, smoking was seen as a sign of freedom for women, and grew as a result. This was a classic appeal to the emotional rather than the rational. It is quite clear that smoking does not make you free (probably a more appropriate slogan for the washing machine or the pill), but the association made women feel powerful, and it stuck.

Today we are well-versed in buying things because they say something about us, or make us feel a certain way, but it was a complete transformation in the 1920s when most selling was done on the basis of information and function. Bernays spent a lifetime helping companies connect with the "irrational emotion" of their customer. Many of Bernays's techniques, such as press releases, product placement and tie-ins are still prevalent today. He pioneered a whole new way of doing business.

There are all sorts of questions around this sort of mass persuasion – the act of converting active citizens into passive consumers (and aiming to control them in the process) doesn't support a more sustainable approach and some of the methods are opaque and manipulative. Bernays is far from a sustainability hero given his contribution to the consumption challenges that we now face. But we can certainly learn from him. Taking ideas and products from niche to mainstream is a key step on Forum's Six Steps to Significant Change. It helps to create the tipping point and is often where sustainable business initiatives stumble. That is essentially what Bernays did.

Companies are now facing major challenges, such as resource scarcity and climate change that are radically changing the way we do business. We need a fresh business revolution – one where companies seek to shape their world for the better, and profit from it. To do this we need to engage the masses – in creating closed-loop products, in changing consumption patterns and the like. And we need to do that in a way that connects with people as people, as Bernays did. A good example of this is Nike's Better World video, which creates an emotional attachment and inspires you to do something different through sport. This is a change at least as big as the one that Bernays instigated with the birth of PR. He created consumerism, we now have to use his techniques to translate that into "consumer citizens" that reward sustainable businesses and are involved in creating a better future.

This blog was originally published on the Guardian's Sustainable Business Network, for which Stephanie has also written blogs on:

• Why companies need to create their own luck when it comes to social change
• What today's green companies can learn from Edison
• How microfinance is a great case study of the steps to significant change

You can read these blogs here.

Photo courtesy of chrisch_ via Flickr