advertising's foundational anthropology for 'making customers'

"It was left to Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and 'father' of public relations, to provide the epitaph for bourgeois ideals of individual autonomy and conscious choice. 'The group mind, ' he wrote in Propaganda (1928), 'does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits, emotions.' To ensure that consumption kept pace with production, Bernays advised, advertisers must learn how to 'make customers' through an understanding of the 'structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a potentially universal public.' The advertisers' job of 'making customers' closely paralleled the new political consultants' aim of 'making voters.' From either view, the 'public' was no longer composed of active citizens but rather manipulable consumers."

-- "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930", T. J. Jackson Lears.