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Why is Madison Avenue gripped by insanity? | page 1, 2, 3, 4
And indeed, there are signs that Rapaille himself is ready to move on. "I would change the United Nations to the United Cultures," he says. "You see, the term 'nation' is entirely obsolete. Why do you have the Kurds fighting? They don't want to be a nation. They want to be a culture." Rapaille is growing animated. "America has no foreign policy," he says. "One of the things I would like to do is to help America to have a foreign policy." But it's not clear that the rest of us will want to relinquish him. As we struggle with data smog, Clinton fatigue and other languors of the millennium, what a comfort to know that the brand builders are turning our world into one big unconscious-friendly theme park, a Jungian Olympus where we can quaff and loll forever amid well-known brands. It is a happy consumer universe, a world where soup delivers voluptuous oral indulgence, jeeps ferry us across wind-wracked wilderness and Tide is a font of all-forgiving mother love. And it's not so bad, life under the beneficent gaze of the new psycho-persuaders. What's the harm, after all, in surrendering to this benign flood of goods and sensations; in allowing Delta to regress us to our infancy; in allowing Shell Oil to submerge us in our own amniotic fluid? It's not as if the depth probers and the people manipulators actually threaten the public of consumers. They merely want to kill us with kindness; to cater to our subsurface needs and desires, to help us do what we already wanted to do. Right? A half-hour into our phone conversation, Sam Cohen, the ego psychologist and object-relations theorist, tells me he has to go. "A conference call with Microsoft," he says. "I'm doing a project for them." Microsoft? I ask. "I know, it's funny," he says. "Because they have a reputation for being almost -- contemptuous of the consumer." Now, however, they too are strip-searching the consumer mind -- lovingly. "They have a product that's lagging far behind the competitor," Cohen tells me. "The two brands are equal in terms of quality, but the competitor has a huge advantage in the marketplace. Now they realize that what they need to do is get inside the consumer's head, and become a more meaningful software brand. They've started to talk not just market share, but mindshare." Maybe Vance Packard was right.
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About the writer Table Talk Sound off Related Salon stories The return of the hidden persuaders Driven by a booming economy, a corporate obsession with brand-building and a feelgood philosophy, a motley crew of ex-grad students, starry-eyed admen and hypnosis gurus are probing the consumer unconscious to sell soap.
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