As a startup or brand it can be difficult to convert prospects into adopting your point of view.

Internally, your value proposition feels obvious. Externally, prospects don’t seem to notice or ‘get it’ as much as you’d like.

This is a painful predicament because adopting your point of view is a critical mental step in developing buying behaviour that’ll initiate prospects to ‘get’ your value proposition and make a purchase.

This predicament is exactly the problem that Edward Bernays set out to solve back in the early 20th century; when America emerged from WWI in an explosion of mass consumerism and conspicuous consumption, shifting from a ‘needs’ to ‘wants’ based culture.

Technological advancements in manufacturing were able to deliver greater economical production volume and variety, and Bernays played a key role in matching the exponential increase in supply chain potential with consumer demand.

He did this masterfully, repeatedly, and at an industrial scale through PR over numerous decades.

Edward… who?

Edward Bernays is probably the most influential go-to-market pioneer and operator you have never heard of:

He is often called the “Father of PR” because he played a pivotal role in creating the public relations function.

If there was an annual G10 meeting for the top 10 most influential go-to-market figures of the last 100 years (the ‘Go-to-market 10’), Edward Bernays would have a seat at the table, right next to David Ogilvy.

Bernays would have organised the whole thing in the first place, to position himself and his point of view as the narrative to adopt.

But, to characterise him as a ‘PR man’ would be a misrepresentation and understatement.

First of all, Bernays is somewhat of a controversial figure. His approach, for many modern PR professionals, is overtly candid and pragmatic — a little cringe.

He did not try to sugar coat the objective of his profession, which he considered was to artificially mold perception and stimulate demand through contrivances that preserve the feeling of individual agency and free will.

Words like ‘propaganda’ were embraced by Bernays, though he was keen to point out a distinction between ‘propaganda’ and ‘impropaganda’ — the idea that propaganda, like any tool, can be used for good or bad intentions.

However, this is subjective and often becomes clearer in hindsight.

In the extreme, some of his successful campaigns — like increasing the use of cigarettes and instigating a coup in Guatemala — certainly haven’t aged well through the lens of retrospective morality.

To counterbalance this, there are polar opposite examples from his life’s work: like increasing the usage of soap amongst children and building support for an Act of Congress that provided federal funding for maternity and childcare.

Ultimately, it boils down to semantics. Today, ‘propaganda’ is a pejorative term discarded in favour of ‘image building’ and ‘managing and disseminating information’.

Secondly, PR is a business function that attempts to increase awareness and manage the way a company is perceived.

Today, it’s very ideology and corporate communications-driven. Often, reflecting inside-out thinking and a kind of wholesale ‘spray and pray’ approach that neuters effectiveness.

There is something of a overlooked art in the techniques of persuasion that Bernays developed — today largely only accessible to organisations with big budgets that can hire elite PR firms.

Except, it wasn’t an art at all. His techniques were rooted in the scientific method.

This approach is what makes Bernays’s methodology still relevant.

Why?

The principles he introduced deal with the mind and psychology.

The tools of the trade may have changed from a century ago — the Internet certainly wasn’t a thing in the 1920s — but the foundational techniques he developed to craft perception are still highly effective.

One of the most successful and significant PR strategies in recent history — Brexit — is textbook Bernays.

On a smaller scale, his techniques are useable for startups and departments with lean budgets and a healthy dose of tenacity. Salesforce did this when they were starting out — I wrote about it here and here.

The Engineering of Consent

The pinnacle of Bernays’s work was a system he developed called The Engineering of Consent.

It prescribes a systematic process of learning the commonly held existing perceptions prospects have and wielding actions rooted in scientific methodology to forge a new favourable perception.

The purpose is to figure out how to transform a minority point of view into a majority point of view through cost-effective objective experimentation.

Harvard Professor Allan M. Brandt breaks down the significance of the words ‘engineering consent’:

Crucially, The Engineering of Consent is not an exhaustive step-by-step manual that goes into the minutiae of detail of how to optimise this or that tool, or, say this or that.

Instead, it’s a guiding set of principles that makes tools effective to use in the first place. It’s pure leverage.

How did Bernays figure this all out, though?

He built up his foundational knowledge of public communications while working for the Committee on Public Information (CPI); a government agency created to influence public opinion to support the US entering World War I.

The CPI became a handsomely funded lab for experimental methodologies in shaping public opinion, utilising new and existing mass communication tools on an unprecedented scale.

It provided a platform for learning that led to breakthrough techniques, and, turned those that ‘graduated’ from the program into masters of molding public opinion.

In addition to Bernays, the CPI also rubbed shoulders with Walter Lippmann, another public communications OG whose post-war theories dramatically influenced public communications and journalism policies.

Among many other things, Walter introduced the concept of a “stereotype” as a mechanism to assess the implications of the way people unconsciously construct and use biased generalisations for navigating the increasingly complex environments they perceive they live in.

Anyway, back to Bernays.

His uncle happened to be Sigmund Freud.

Yes, the Sigmund Fruend.

Bernays used his uncle’s breakthrough work in psychology as the initial basis for conducting social experiments of persuasion, by matching the commercial objectives of his clients (e.g. increase sales) with the ‘unconscious needs’ and ‘irrational desires’ of prospects.

This was ground-breaking.

Before this, public opinion management was a one-sided and communicatively blind exercise. The role of a ‘PR’ did not exist — the closest function was a ‘publicist’ or ‘press agent’.

Companies would place stories and messages in newspapers, cross their fingers, and hope for the best.

Bernays introduced two key elements:

• Feedback loop. Public communication was designed and iterated based on research and experiments. It became I/O oriented, mediating the perception of prospects with the objectives of companies.

• Psychological potency. The stories and messages created were the output of a deliberate exercise to tap into and provoke unrealised psychological desires and insecurities.

His methods were based on his theory that, for most things in life, people do not have the aptitude for original thought or the capacity to think critically.

Further, what people believe to be true is not itself an objective truth, but a perceived truth, which is mostly formed from the recycled ideas of others.

And further still, this dynamic is diametrically opposed to the way people perceive themselves. In other words, people unconsciously convince themselves that they do have the aptitude for original thought and the capacity to think critically about an extensive range of topics far beyond their effective and rational capability.

In essence: people are feeling experts, not critical experts, in most aspects of their lives and the perception of the former is often surrogated for the latter — creating a vast opportunity to introduce new ideas and persuade.

For example, I drink coffee every day and it feels like I “know coffee”. But, all I really know is the way it makes me feel.

A lot of ideas could be introduced to me that would change the way I perceive coffee, without me really understanding the underlying motivation for why that idea was introduced or being able to effectively critically evaluate it without material inquiry.

Practically, this is impossible to do for the hundreds of ideas that I and everyone else are exposed to each day. So, people utilise mental shortcuts to accept or reject ideas to varying degrees; cross-referencing the idea against knowledge and perceptions that are biased, emotional, irrational, and/or insufficient.

Under Bernays’s theories, I would “consent” to an idea because it has been deliberately “engineered” to compute with my existing perceptions; with the intention that the new idea will instil a desired behaviour.

Effective Bernays PR, in essence, means you aren’t consciously aware an idea has been engineered to achieve the desired effect — you perceive you came to adopt a certain point of view through pure self-agency.

This is some pretty dark Orwellian thinking.

The effectiveness of his campaigns demonstrated a degree of validity to the claims, though ultimately how people think and perceive is a lot more complex and nuanced.

Some of his work was based on really unhinged Freudian hypotheses.

For example, in a campaign for Betty Crocker’s “add water” instant cake mix, legend has it he suggested adding an egg to the recipe to “symbolise” the mother giving one of her eggs to her family.

As per Freudian theory: “An egg also has the connotation of life and birth, making the creation of the cake more meaningful -- the housewife thus 'gives birth' for her husband.”

This approach was developed from discovering a subconscious perception that ‘mothers felt guilty’ serving a dish in which they ‘contributed very little’ from their own labour.

Like I said, unhinged.

The crazy thing is it worked. Sales skyrocketed.

But, not due to Freudian foresight.

As a modern psychotherapist explains, it’s likely the addition of the egg to the recipe made the end product feel more valuable (enjoyable and nutritious). Therefore, neutralising any feeling of “guilt” from someone serving it (irrespective of their sex). Perhaps that was the real intention of Betty Crocker and its advisors all along.

Over time, as the field of psychology and behavioural science advanced, so too did Bernays’s (and his successors’) ability to apply those learnings practically.

Here is an infamous case study where his firm utilised the techniques he pioneered extremely effectively:

Lucky Strike, 1929

In the 1920s smoking on the street was taboo for women. American Tobacco, the owner of the Lucky Strike brand, wanted to diminish this perception with the view it would increase the volume of cigarettes smoked by its female customers.

To destroy the taboo, Bernays consulted with psychiatrist Abraham Brill to understand the perceptions and sentiments towards cigarettes among women. They learned that cigarette smoking had connotations of power, which were equated with men.

From this discovery, Bernays saw an opportunity to connect this perception with the ongoing fight for equality for women with men. Cigarette smoking, he hypothesised, could be a highly visible assertion of female emancipation.

What was missing was a catalyst to instil this behaviour and to give the idea a critical mass of social currency so that it may spread and grow.

The solution: Bernays engineered a news story that would provide the catalyst needed — a publicity stunt.

His firm covertly recruited a group of well-to-do young women to march in the 1929 New York City Easter Parade armed with Lucky Strikes and a catchy soundbite — branding them “torches of freedom” for press coverage potency.

The event was meticulously planned. The young women were briefed on the narrative they should share with the press on the day of the parade, and private photographers were hired to protect against the risk newspaper photographers did not get a decent shot.

It worked. The publicity stunt probed such a mental nerve that it became an event of genuine historical significance. Newspapers widely covered the event, kicking off a national debate. The front page of the New York Times read: “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom”.

A taboo began to be unravelled. Reports of women smoking on the street quickly came in from cities and towns across the country. Within five weeks, segregation rules barring women from smoking areas in theatres were repealed.

It’s a powerful example of the power of PR to change a behaviour that advertising and other forms of obvious self-promotion struggle to achieve; particularly if the press coverage mirrors the Positioning of the category and brand.

Bernays understood this difference supremely. He prized the power of the news media precisely because it masked the motivation of the companies driving the agenda.

Prospects are much more open to adopting an idea if it comes from a ‘trusted’ third party than a company with an obvious profit motivation and possible conflict of interest.

On this occasion, it was a win for public equality but a loss for personal health.

In his later writing, Bernays claims he was unaware cigarettes were carcinogenic at the time of this campaign. After the Surgeon General Report in 1964 linked cigarettes with poor health, he rejected any further work with tobacco manufacturers.

A few more case studies:

• 🥓 For Beech-Nut Packing Company, who wanted to sell more bacon in the US, he introduced the idea of eating bacon for breakfast. Before that, it wasn’t really a thing. (how he did it)

• ⭐ He made US President Calvin Coolidge…. cool. Bernays helped President Coolidge win his first presidential election by associating him with A-list celebrities. (how he did it)

• 👗 For American Tobacco, he made the colour green fashionable in women’s couture so that it matched the green design of Lucky Strike packets. (how he did it)

• 🧼 For Proctor and Gamble, he made Ivory Soap popular with children by instilling the idea soap could be a creative medium of expression and source of fun through ‘soap sculpting’. (how he did it)

• 🚼 For Good Housekeeping, he built public support for one of the first congressional bills for funding maternal care — the Shepherd Towner Act.

Throughout his career he worked with a plethora of clients across across business and politics, driving a set of changes that had a profound impact on society.

From this body of work he developed and tweaked his system: The Engineering of Consent.

Bernays wrote about this prolifically, so I was curious to read through his work and pick out the main elements.

Here they are below, in a bitesize format, through the lens of the 2020s.

📘 Playbook

🔀 Segmentation

Define who is the target. Whose “consent” does the PR practitioner need?

A first step would be to map where on the adoption curve the value proposition currently sits. Is it early adopters, early majority, etc?

Once that has been identified, the next step is to map the stage to the key buyer personas that should be influenced.

🎯 Define Objectives

Every PR campaign must be predicated on laying out in advance what is to be achieved. To understand precisely what should be accomplished.

Generalised objectives like “increase sales”, “increase brand awareness”, or “increase subscribers” gloss over the nuanced objectives that achieve the ultimate desired result.

There are three tiers of time-based objectives to calibrate. For example:

• Long-term objectives. Next 3 years.

• Intermediate objectives. Next 1 year.

• Immediate objectives. Next quarter.

To approach these, the PR practitioner should think about the mental steps needed to achieve a generalised objective like “increase sales”.

What is inhibiting that, currently?

Utilising the ‘5 why’s’ framework starting from the problem definition itself can be a way to nail this down.

• Prospects are not buying our product

  • Why? They are not aware of our brand

    • Why? No one is talking about our product

      • Why? It’s not interesting enough

        • Why? It lacks differentiation

          • Why? We haven’t created a differentiated perception

From this, specific objectives should be produced. This clarifies everyone’s thinking and doing. It also keeps the campaign from veering off track.

Examples:

Once this has been done it’s time for a sanity check. Why would the company do this rather than something else?

What assumptions have the objectives been based on? Calling them out is crucial. Which are the highest risk? Do they match risk appetite?

Is what has been set out to achieve attainable? One of the key elements that defined Bernays’s ability to repeat PR success was that he sought out and identified limitations before defining objectives.

Limitations have multiple dimensions:

• Perception. Choose the idea to be promoted carefully. Most ideas will not stick. Minds can’t be changed, they are molded from existing beliefs.

• Resources. Does the company have enough resources to position the idea?

• Time. Does the company have enough time to position the idea?

Objectives represent a set of hypotheses that should be validated or invalidated. They are not immutable. They can be modified as a result of learning. The setting up of objectives should be a never-ending process.

Measurement

Once PR campaigns go live, their effectiveness should be measured. In the beginning, this will mostly be indicative.

What is the consent metric?

In other words, how is the campaign being measured to assess the degree of success? How is success being defined?

Improved marketing and sales metrics can function as a proxy, but it’s too unreliable on its own because there are too many variables.

To get a better mental picture, the PR practitioner must look for clues about how the brand and product are perceived in the mind of the prospect. That means surveys, interviews, social listening, reviews, etc.

A simple metric is to track what words and attributes are associated with the brand, and how these change over time. Traditionally, ‘share of mind’ studies have been a popular perception metric relative to competing options.

🔎 Research Prospects

An understanding of the problem to be solved is the most difficult part of organised research. Without focus and direction, it can be too abstract or run astray.

Bernays advocated a “painstaking” level of research to achieve optimum results. Ultimately, the objective of the research is to discover a shared ‘unconscious need’ or ‘irrational desire’ amongst the segmented group of prospects, and, the methods that can be leveraged to mold a favourable perception.

To ensure focus and actionability, the research must verify or refute a set of pre-mediated assumptions, with a view to how the outcomes of this could affect a future course of action.

The PR practitioner must estimate the possible outcome of a key question or point — how important it is to relate a hypothesis to a future course of action. Then ask how this outcome would influence a decision if proved correct, and how differently if it were incorrect.

This is a test of actionability. It is a question which should be answered before any research occurs.

Here is a list of key questions to answer, with a relatively high degree of confidence, during the research process:

• What motivates the prospect?

• What are the prospect’s biases?

• What are the prospect’s worries?

• What are the prospect’s anxieties?

• How can you reach the prospect?

• What are the prospect’s prejudices?

• From whom do they get their ideas?

• What is going on around the prospect?

• What ideas are prospects ready to absorb?

• Why don’t they perceive our point of view?

• What are the pains and gains of the prospect?

• Why don’t they act more favourably towards us?

• How did the prospect get to where they are today?

• Where does the prospect perceive they are going?

• What is the flow of ideas, from whom and to whom?

• What are the impluses which govern those perceptions?

• How can we reach the most people for the least money?

• What are the present perceptions toward the situation?

• What are they ready to do, given an effective stimulant?

• What voices effectively influence their thought process?

• How can you reach the prospect through those that influence them?

• What is our share of prospect’s “minds” relative to competing ideas?

• In what way does the category fail to measure up to expectations?

• How do specific actions and broad representations of the category affect perception?

• What is the general perception towards the products and services provided by category and individual company?

• To what extent and ratio do authority, factual evidence, precision, reason, tradition, and emotion play a part in the acceptance of ideas?

The research should also reveal any fundamental changes that are taking place in perception and opinion toward the category. Is there a shift? Or, is it static?

Research tools to collect this information:

• Surveys

• Interviews

• Focus groups (guide here)

• Behavioural Experiments (e.g. A/B or multivariate testing)

🧭 Reorient Goals

Once the research has been completed it is time to reassess objectives.

Based on the learnings from the research, do the objectives still look attainable?

Distinguish between what is important and what is difficult. Often, what is difficult can mask itself as being important. Reprioritise accordingly.

♟️ Determine Strategy

Strategy is largely an exercise in determining how to leverage the learnings from the research phase.

There is a guiding set of principles for calibrating it:

• To be successful, the PR strategy must appeal to the motives of the prospect.

• Motives are the activation of both conscious and subconscious pressures created by the force of desires.

• The strategy must be designed based on known tactical ability.

Motivations are often not as apparent as they may seem. For example: losing weight is a benefit of a diet product, but it is rarely the motivation. Instead, the motivation could be to feel younger again.

Another example: increased productivity could be a benefit of a B2B SaaS product, but that is not the underlying motivation. Instead, the motivation could be to signal an early adopter mentality.

The PR practitioner must keep probing until they find what really motivates prospects.

Once a shortlist of motives has been produced, consider how these motives might be activated in the context of a PR campaign. Which is the most powerful? How might it be utilised in a tactic, practically?

Pick 2-3 motives to experiment with.

The next step is to pick out the commonly held perceptions uncovered in the research. Particularly: points of view, biases, enablers, and disablers. Make a list.

Then, map the list of perceptions to motivations and demotivations, prioritising those with the most PR campaign alignment potential.

For example: going back to the diet product, protein could perceived as ‘healthy’ and an ‘enabler’ for feeling younger (motivational), whereas sugar could be perceived as ‘unhealthy’ and a ‘disabler’ for feeling younger (demotivational).

The list of motives and perceptions is needed for the next step.

📖 Setup Narrative & Symbols

Narrative

Narratives are created to arouse motives and point to satisfying them.

There is a guiding set of principles for designing narratives:

• Prospects are motivated by emotion more than logic. Logic can be utilised to provoke an emotional response.

• Prospects only accept what they are willing to accept. The molder of perception must enlist the established point of view.

• Ideas that are not superficially acceptable can be made acceptable if they can be shown to be of value and if their appeal can be reconciled with existing preconceptions.

There are many ways to build a narrative. A lot of the most successful fall under similar broad themes, which are: to be controversial, contrarian, novel, and surprising.

One way to do this is to take the prospect’s motivation, apply it to an existing motivational perception, and then position this combined device against a demotivational perception.

In Bernays’s “Torches of Freedom” campaign, he threaded together the motivation for women to feel more independent with the perception that cigarettes are a statement of individuality, positioning this notion against the perception that men’s privilege to “smoke on the streets” was demotivational.

Pushing the idea that cigarettes were a vehicle to assert liberty and equality with men created controversy and earned PR coverage that instilled buying behaviour.

Symbols

Symbols are designed to be a memorable and concise representation of the narrative. It becomes a mental shortcut when people query the idea.

A symbol can be anything: words, image, person, etc.

The objective is to create a symbol that dramatises the narrative. It’s essentially a verbal or visual positioning asset for the PR campaign or strategy.

“Torches of Freedom” was a verbal symbol for the Lucky Strike campaign.

The “NHS Brexit bus” was a visual symbol for the Vote Leave campaign.

The key to this step is to be dramatically creative within a very tight set of guidelines that focus the energy of the symbol towards the narrative.

⚙️ Tactics

Strategic Fit

Before tactics are chosen, strategic fit should be assessed.

For example, the rate of idea absorption varies with the complexity of concepts communicated.

If the timeline to achieve the desired level of consent is short, Bernays suggests simplifying the objective and leaning more heavily on tactics that appeal to emotions.

If the timeline is longer, more emphasis can be placed on facts and education. The reverse is also true. If an ambitious objective is not adaptable, the timeline should be to accommodate it.

Choosing Tactics

Tactics are the individual PR campaigns that are designed to achieve the objectives of the overall PR strategy.

For example: publicity stunt, published research, event, product launch.

The timing and planning of tactics will produce a blueprint for each of the three time periods (immediate, intermediate, and long-term) defined in the strategy and will indicate what to do and when.

There is a guiding set of principles for designing tactics:

• It must drive home the narrative.

• It must be dramatised so that the basic idea it represents stands out in the marketplace of competing ideas. It has to be pattern-breaking.

• Tactics must utilise simple language that prospects can identify with and comprehend.

• Timing can be critical. Consider what days and events in the year will amplify tactics.

• Certain ideas are more powerful when transmitted through certain media than others. Consider which mediums will amplify the message.

• Choose words carefully. The right words empower a campaign. The wrong words neuter a campaign. Often, it is nuanced.

• Focus on designing tactics that create news, not follow news.

Particularly for complex matters, Bernays suggests building progressive narrative discovery into campaigns.

In other words, the prospect at first sees only a small part of a story, just as only the top of an iceberg is visible. Then, prospects are gradually induced to see more and more until they get a full picture of the point of view being communicated.

Bernays developed a favourite set of tools to build his PR campaigns. They are still highly effective today.

They were:

• Publicity stunts. Which, the news media reported on.

• Influencers. Which, provided a platform for distribution and gave credibility to campaign stories.

• Research. Which, the news media reported on and gave credibility to campaign stories.

Bernays was also a pioneer in utilising product placement.

He distributed the products of his clients to Hollywood studio executives, accompanied with a very specific set of instructions on how they could be utilised in films to subtly add a new layer of depth to characters and scenes.

This dissemination of products into media helped reinforce the perception that the ideas being pushed in PR campaigns had gained widespread adoption amongst both the prospects’ peer group and by influential personalities like movie stars.

That’s it for today!

As I said above, this is a bitesized Bernays playbook. If you want to go deeper, here’s The Engineering of Consent book in downloadable PDF form.

To get a feel for the man himself, here is Bernays appearing on Letterman in 1985:

I’ll be back in your inbox soon.

Martin 👋

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