Abstract

Multisensory Marketing: The Look and Feel of Building Consumer Confidence

In his 1923 article, “Understanding the Consumer’s Mind,” applied psychologist Harry Dexter Kitson described a process wherein consumers “image” themselves in relation to a product, producing a “feeling of pleasantness” and prompting “movement” toward the commodity. In Kitson’s formulation, sight and touch, perception and sensation, mind and body, were equally bound up in the act of buying. Such multisensory ideas about marketing were typical of an early- to mid-twentieth-century discourse that united art, psychology, and the fledgling field of market research in their tireless pursuit of increased sales. Container Corporation of America, a packaging company founded by the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke in 1926, became an early and effective advocate for packaging as a means of appealing to consumers’ senses. This paper considers how Container Corporation packaged packaging itself as the point of a rich optic and haptic encounter between consumers, products, and manufacturers. The company’s early institutional advertising regularly promoted packaging’s visual and material qualities—its beauty and its strength—as entwined facets of modern merchandising, capable of simultaneously protecting and promoting consumer goods. But it also established these sensations as the basis for building consumer confidence; an attractive and sturdy package, according to this logic, signaled the creativity and dependability of its packager. Indeed, this paper is concerned not only with how packaging mediates a consumer’s encounter with particular products, but also with how it conditions public opinion of the manufacturers themselves. In the language of applied psychologists, it seeks to explain how sense perceptions transform into mental pictures, prompting consumers to “image” themselves in relation to corporations.