Istoria romantat-intunecata a PR-ului

Edward Bernays e un tip despre care, exceptandu-i pe cei care au studiat PR-ul la facultati, majoritatea oamenilor n-au auzit. Totusi e unanim recunoscut ca taticul PR-ului. Omul considera ca manipularea e absolut necesara intr-o societate pe care o vedea drept irationala si periculoasa datorita instinctului de turma. Combinand ideile lui Gustave LeBon si Wilfriend Trotter asupra psihologiei maselor cu cele din psihanaliza unchiului sau, Sigmund Freud, Bernays a identificat mecanismul si motivatiile intelectului de grup afirmand ca este posibil sa controlezi si manipulezi masele pana la un anumit punct.

In documentarul BBC realizat de Adam Curtis - The Century of Self - am dat peste o interesanta expunere a influentei sale si a nasterii "relatiilor publice".

(de la minutul 7:35) sau pur si simplu cititi mai jos

Edward Bernays:

When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war you could certainly use it for peace. And propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it. So what I did was try to find some other words so we found the word "Council on Public Relations".

Bernays returned to New York and set up as a Public Relations Councilman in a small office off Broadway.
It was the first time the term had even been used. Since the end of the 19th century, America had become a mass industrial society with millions clustered together in the cities. Bernays was determined to find a way to manage and alter the way these new crowds thought and felt.

To do this he turned to the writings of his uncle Sigmund. While in Paris Bernays had sent his uncle a gift of some Havana cigars. In return Freud had sent him a copy of his "General Introduction to Psychoanalysis".

Bernays read it, and the picture of hidden irrational forces inside human beings, fascinated him. He wondered whether he might make money by manipulation of the unconscious.

Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser and Colleague of Bernays:

What Eddie got from Freud, was indeed this idea that there is a lot more going on in human decision making.Not only among individuals but even more importantly among groups that this idea that information drives behavior. So Eddie began to formulate this idea that you had to look at things that will play to people's irrational emotions. You see, that moved Eddie immediately into a different category from other people in his field and most government officials and managers of the day who thought if you just hit people with all this factual information they would look at that say go "of course" and Eddie knew that was not the way the world worked.

Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke. At that time there was a taboo against women smoking and one of his early clients. George Hill, the President of the American Tobacco corporation asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it.

Edward Bernays - 1991:

He says we're losing half of our market. Because men have invoked a taboo against women smoking in public. Can you do anything about that? I said let me think about it. And then I said: If I may have permission to see a psychoanalyst to find out what cigarettes mean to women. He said: what'll cost? So I called up Dr. Brille, A.A. Brille, who was the leading psychoanalyst in New York at the time. 

- How come you didn't call your uncle? Why didn't you call your uncle? 

- Cause he was in Vienna..

A.A. Brille was one of the first psychoanalysts in America and for a large fee, he told Bernays that cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power. He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power then women would smoke, because then they would have their own penises.

Every year New York held an Easter day parade to which thousands came. And Bernays decided to stage an event there. He persuaded a group of rich debutants to hide cigarettes under their clothes. Then, they should join the parade and at a given signal from him they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically.
Bernays then informed the press that he had heard that a group of suffragettes were preparing to protest by lighting up what they called torches of freedom.

Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser and Colleague of Bernays:

He knew this would be an outcry, and he knew that all of the photographers would be there to capture this moment so he was ready with a phrase which was "torches of freedom". 

So here you have a symbol, women, young women, debutantes, smoking a cigarette in public with a phrase that means anybody who believes in this kind of equality pretty much has to support them in the ensuing debate about this, because... "torches of freedom".I mean, what's on all our American coins? it's liberty, she's holding up the torch, you see? and so all of this is there together, there's emotion, there's memory and there's a rational phrase, even knowing it's using a lot of emotionall, it's a phrase that works in a rational sense...And all of this is together...

And so the next day this was not just in all the New York papers it was across the United States and around the world. And from that point forward the sale of cigarettes to women began to rise. He had made them socially acceptable with a single symbolic act. What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked it made her more powerful and independent.

An idea that still persists today.

It made him realize that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you link products to their emotional desires and feelings. The idea that smoking actually made women freer, was completely irrational.
But it made them feel more independent. It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.

Ps: s-a lansat iphone 5. Au vandut 5 milioane de bucati in 3 zile.