Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research

This is an edited scholarly collection rather than a single-author argument, brought together by Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010 at 293 pages. Its subject is Ernest Dichter, the Vienna-born psychologist who settled in the United States and built motivational research into a commercial discipline, and its stated purpose is to open up the postwar world of that research and the claims it made about how consumers think, feel and act. The sixteen chapters are arranged in four parts. An introduction is followed by a section on the dimensions of Dichter's work and personality, then by a section of case studies on what the publisher calls the branding of consumer life, and finally by a section on the European theatre, which traces the influence of psychoanalytic consumer research beyond the United States. The collection is catalogued as peer-reviewed research. For a vault that holds the claim that Dichter was commissioned in 1961 to design around consumer guilt, this is the scholarly literature on the man rather than a source for that particular commission.

Written from the publisher's page for the book at Palgrave Macmillan and the record for it in the Copenhagen Business School research portal.

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• Ernest Dichter