Ernest Dichter was born in Vienna on August 14, 1907, into a Jewish family that struggled financially after the First World War. He left school at 14 to help support his family and later worked as a sales clerk, sign painter, and window dresser in his uncle’s department storea, an experience that piqued his interest in how display and presentation affected customers – how buying wasn’t simply about satisfying a real and pressing need, but often about how a product made us feel, and how a product made us want it.
He went to Paris in 1929, studied literature at the Sorbonne and earned a licencié ès lettres, before returning to Vienna in 1930 and where he pursued psychology at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1934. His intellectual background was much broader than the shorthand description of him as a Freudian psychologist implies – luminaries such as Karl and Charlotte Bühler were important teachers; Paul Lazarsfeld taught him statistics and market research; and philosopher Moritz Schlick taught him logic and epistemology. Dichter later recalled that Schlick taught him essentially to ask questions rather than accept surface explanations; this was to be a core tenet of his later work; he became deeply interested in psychoanalysis. He underwent analysis himself, maintained a private psychoanalytic practice from 1934 to 1937 and studied with Wilhelm Stekel, an early member of Freud’s circle, and August Aichhorn, the influential psychoanalyst who worked with troubled young people. Horowitz noted that what appealed to Dichter was a particularly practical form of psychoanalysis — using psychological insight to solve immediate problems rather than simply constructing theory. The decisive experience which foreshadowed his later career came in 1936 at Vienna’s Psychoeconomic Institute, where Paul Lazarsfeld was conducting commercial research. One project investigated milk-drinking habits using depth interviews — long conversations intended to reveal motivations rather than simply collect yes/no answers – in what we might now refer to as market research. Why milk, why do you like it, how much do you like it, how does it make you feel. It looked beyond supposedly simple choices we make as consumers and asked – why? But Europe was changing.
While working at the Psychoeconomic Institute, Dichter was arrested and held for four weeks because the authorities believed the institute had been associated with illegal political activity. After his release he discovered that a Nazi newspaper had listed him among alleged subversives. As a Jewish intellectual already under suspicion, his prospects in Austria were bleak, so he left Vienna in early 1937, initially going to Paris. In 1938, as the Nazi threat intensified, he emigrated to the United States. Like many who fled west during that era, it was a decision that defined his life’s work. Historian Daniel Horowitz describes his subsequent career as a process of self-reinvention: a poor Viennese immigrant became one of postwar America’s great champions of consumer capitalism.
Looking for work in America, Dichter wrote to companies describing himself as
“a young psychologist from Vienna” with ideas that could help them sell their products and communicate their message and values more effectively. Dichter was hired by Esquire, where he used depth interviewing to analyse its readers and advertising environment.
He then undertook one of his early famous pieces of commercial work for Ivory soap in 1939, where, rather than asking people whether they liked the smell, price or cleaning ability of Ivory, he encouraged them to talk at length about bathing.
He concluded that a bath was not merely washing – it could be purification, preparation for a special occasion and an unusually acceptable opportunity for physical self-attention. Horowitz records Dichter’s rather Freudian interpretation of bathing as one of the limited opportunities available to the puritanical American to engage in bodily self-caress. His work helped shift Ivory advertising towards the idea of a psychological as well as physical “fresh start”.
His groundbreaking work meant that he was soon in demand from other companies looking to understand why consumers did or did not buy their products, and often those companies were overseas and looking to break the American market by understanding the American psyche in particular. And this is where booze comes into the picture.
In September 1961 Dichter published the Pilot Survey on Attitudes Towards Scotch Whiskey; Dichter’s Institute conducted 32 depth-projective interviews in metropolitan New York, interviewing both Scotch and non-Scotch drinkers. The research questions are thoroughly modern: why choose Scotch rather than bourbon or rye; what physical characteristics such as colour, body, flavour and smokiness mean psychologically; what sort of person is imagined to drink a light Scotch; how important status is; and whether consumers would pay more for a ‘lighter’ product. Dichter’s researchers said scotch consumers preferred it because it was not “sweet” or “raw” but “mellow and smooth”, while noting that the “trend toward lightness” was particularly pronounced among younger drinkers in their 30s and 40s. They also concluded that scotch conveyed status and prestige: drinking it allowed the consumer to enter what the report called a higher social sphere associated with discrimination and sophistication.
His 1963 Vat 69 Classic Light study runs to more than 90 pages and is a full motivational-research project on the market for a lighter scotch. Its recommendations say consumers could be induced to change brands if the new whiskey promised lightness plus fuller taste, provided that promise was backed by an established “status” name. It recommended marketing not just to existing J&B and Cutty Sark consumers but to a broad upper- and middle-income audience and specifically said promotional efforts should reach “younger people on the way up” as well as women.
Dichter’s Vat 69 material also shows how sophisticated Dichter’s thinking about “lightness” was; this was not simply a recipe specification, his researchers were asking what a lighter whiskey said about the person drinking it. The study found that an explicitly light Vat 69 could acquire a somewhat more feminine image and be seen particularly as appropriate for an “occasional” or “moderate” drinker rather than a heavy one. In other words, changing the liquid changed not just perceived flavour but the imagined identity of its consumer.
In a January 1963 letter from Dichter to the advertising agency Fletcher Richards, Calkins & Holden about the proposed Vat 69 Light, he argues that J&B had succeeded because it arrived at a particularly favourable moment when American consumers had “substantial unsatisfied consumer needs” that heavier, darker Scotches were failing to meet. He warned that simply producing another light Scotch would not be enough: the product needed a new and exciting image rather than appearing as a “me too” competitor.
As Dichter’s fame grew, so did his client list, and in October 1965, Dichter’s Institute prepared American Tourist Travel to Ireland for the Irish Tourist Board. Its purpose was to understand the “mentality” of the prospective American tourist and travel agent so that Ireland could advertise itself more effectively. Interestingly, it deliberately excluded Americans of Irish descent from the principal study because their attitudes were thought already to be relatively well understood – they loved Ireland because it was the old country, and even several generations later, was still some distant and ancient homeland. So Dichter wanted to investigate the American who was not of Irish descent. Next up was his March 1967 proposal on greater use of the Irish language, submitted to the Minister for Finance, which shows that this relationship with Ireland continued as for the report Dichter proposed interviewing different Irish groups to uncover why people did or did not speak Irish rather than simply surveying the numbers. His work on tourism, the American market, and Irish identity meant that it was only a matter of time until the Irish whiskey industry came knocking at the Institute’s door.
Irish whiskey had once enjoyed a substantial international reputation in the United States. But its position had deteriorated following Prohibition, the loss of export markets and increasing competition from Scotch – and tastes had simply moved on. After Prohibition ended in 1933, Irish producers faced the problem of introducing their whiskey to a generation of American consumers who had little direct experience of it.
Historian Marion R. Casey, writing for Hagley Museum and Library where the Dichter archive is stored (and available to read online for free), provides an interesting example of how early this problem emerged: In 1934, William Jameson marketed Old Dublin Whiskey in America with a shamrock prominently displayed on the bottle. Four years later, the company introduced something even more unusual: Irish American Whiskey, which was 25% twenty-year-old Irish pot-still whiskey and 75% one-year-old Kentucky straight whiskey.
It was an attempt to produce something recognisably Irish but suited to American tastes and expectations, but the experiment was not as enduring as John Jameson’s traditional Irish whiskey. But it showed that Irish producers were already considering how their products might be adapted for the American market decades before Dichter became involved.
By the 1960s, the challenge had become more urgent; scotch producers had successfully established their blended whiskies as desirable international products, offering lighter, smoother takes on the flavours previously perceived as heavy or medicinal. Brands such as J&B, Cutty Sark and Chivas Regal benefited from associations with sophistication, quality and modern lifestyles, and Irish whiskey was losing ground, as the industry faced an existential crisis back home.
In 1966, John Jameson & Son, John Power & Son and the Cork Distilleries Company merged to form Irish Distillers Limited. The merger was intended to address the industry’s structural problems, but it also created an opportunity to rethink how Irish whiskey was produced and marketed; the new company needed to understand the modern American consumer, so they commissioned Dichter to dig into the psyche of the modern buyer.
In A Pilot Survey on Attitudes Towards Scotch Whiskey, Dichter’s Institute for Motivational Research explained why consumers preferred scotch to bourbon or rye. The report states: “Scotch tastes better. It is not ‘sweet’ or ‘raw’ but mellow and smooth.” One respondent described switching from bourbon to scotch thus: “It is much smoother than any Bourbon, even the most expensive brands.”
When Dichter came to research Irish whiskey, there was a natural carry-over from his work on scotch – consumers wanted smooth spirits, but in studying the Irish whiskey category he discovered that American perceptions of the roughness of the product was not entirely tied to the experience of drinking it.
Back to the historian Marion R. Casey, and her research on how Irish whiskey advertising adapted to American popular culture, or what she calls the “commercialization of ethnicity.”
Casey says one of Dichter’s key findings was that attitudes to Irish whiskey were being shaped not only by the liquid but by negative stereotypes of Irish people. She gives a verbatim consumer quote from Dichter’s work on Irish whiskey: “Then, of course, the reputation of the Irish is that you’d be taking a glass of Irish whiskey and be fighting in no time.”
The respondent continued: “There’s a lot of people think that, you know.”
When Americans described Irish whiskey as “strong fiery and distinctly rough”, the evidence suggests at least some of that perception was bound up with their image of the Irish themselves. That extraordinary quotation Casey found shows how the perceived character of the people could become transferred to the perceived character of the drink.
There are really three layers of “roughness” in Dichter’s work: genuine sensory harshness; unfamiliarity with the flavour profile; and a psychological/cultural expectation that a particular whiskey ought to be rough because of what the consumer believed about the product, its drinkers or its country of origin.
Dichter’s proposed solution to Irish whiskey’s American problem was not simply “make the whiskey smoother”. The evidence points towards a dual response: alter the product so it was more approachable to contemporary American drinking habits, while also changing what Irishness signified to an American consumer.
In the decade that followed, Irish whiskey producers absorbed what Dichter found, but also learned from the Scots about lighter blends, and in some cases, reformulated the product. In an article in the Evening Herald in July 1980, this new method was profiled. Below is a transcript.
FOR THE OLDER FOLK AND ANYONE INTERESTED IN THE SPIRIT WORLD . . .
Our own hard stuff gets the aid of a computer
The traditional Irish whiskey industry has been revolutionised, with computer blending and motivational research taking over from ancient lore and primitive chemistry.
RICHARD MILNER reports:
WHAT IS really annoying is that we started the whole whiskey business: by 1800, 20 years before the first existing Scotch distillery was established, there were 2000 Irish distilleries in operation. Now, there are merely two, the oldest (licensed in 1608) at Bushmills in the north, the youngest (completed in 1975) at Midleton, Co. Cork. Over the past 10 years, this very traditional industry has been quietly but completely revolutionised.
What marks the revolution is that a single distillery at Midleton now produces seven brands including Jameson, Paddy and Power’s, and most are different in overseas markets.
Once upon a Victorian time, people abroad drank more Irish than Scotch. Even in the 1920’s Americans — not least immigrants from the Old Country — had about 400 brands to choose from. But two world wars and barley rationing disrupted the outflow.
It was partly the Irish distillers’ fault. They were more concerned with home sales than exports: whiskey still accounts for a staggering 54 per cent of the Irish spirits market. And they had rather overlooked the possibilities of a second original Irish invention — the patent “Column” still.
The main difference between the Scots and the Irish is that each considers the other is going about distillation the wrong way round. The Scots distill their malt and grain whiskey separately, blending them together to match standard brands afterwards. The Irish blend their malted and unmalted grain to standard brand recipes from the start, distilling first in a pot (“malt”) still and diverting some excess liquor through a patent (“grain”) still before a third distillation.
Aeneas Coffey’s patent still enabled whiskey to be distilled continuously instead of in batches, as with the traditional pot still. It was a cheaper process and, because it eliminated more of those distinctive impurities, produced a more neutral spirit. (Coffey was Inspector-General of Excise, which did not endear him to the Irish). The invention was taken up by the Scots, who mixed this cheaper grain whiskey with their more flavoured pot-stilled malts to create lighter, best-selling brands for the mass market.
In world market terms, Scotch currently outsells Irish by about 43 cases to one, a problem that concerned the big three distilleries founded by John Jameson (1780), James Power (1791) and James Murphy (1825) when they eventually amalgamated in 1966. Three years later the transformation of Irish whiskey was begun by a Scot, marketing director Archie Cook, fresh from Mackintosh’s Quality Street. He asked two basic questions. Are we producing what the consumer wants? And if not, why not?
To Irishmen steeped in Power’s Gold Label, Jameson Crested Ten or Paddy, questions like this must have sounded almost like heresy. But it made good marketing sense to their managing director Kevin McCourt and persuaded chairman Frank O’Reilly. If Americans drank everything poured over ice, Irish would have to adapt its flavour or risk foundering on the rocks.
The Irish whiskey revolution started in a small way with Tullamore Dew, which did not have a particularly high reputation in Ireland. It was reformulated in Dublin, discreetly re-marketed in West Germany in 1969 and took off quietly round Europe. Pronounced Tout l’Amour in Paris and Dev in Hamburg, the new improved Tullamore Dew is now being sold in England: a wonderful drop of the soft stuff.
Irish Distillers had recognised that the American resistance to its traditional products was conditioned by certain negative factors. Americans considered Irish was strong fiery and distinctly rough. So the board consulted Dr. Ernest (The Strategy of Desire) Dichter, the guru of U.S. motivational research, and he advised consumer re-education. McCourt and Cook went one better. They switched drinks on the United States.
“What we did was to turn out a product slightly down on the nose on the flavour scale, and distinctively Irish, but which would drink superbly on the rocks”, Archie Cook (who left I.D. last year) commented later. It was codified Blend 1071, which became JNAB for Jameson North American Blend. “Having done that with Jameson”, he added, “we turned to the others and modified their characteristics, while still preserving their Irish uniqueness”.
The revolution was not confined to marketing new whiskeys in old bottles. It has become clear that Irish Distillers could not both modernise and expand the old distilleries established by Messrs. Jameson and Power in central Dublin. So in April 1973, the group started construction of a £9 million distil-everything complex which ended two other traditions.
According to established mythology, the precise shape of the pot-still, and beyond-analysis qualities of the distilling water both affect the individual flavour. New Midleton’s four, 17,000-gallon pot-stills have thick, barley-inclined “swan necks” quite unlike Old Midleton’s giant kettle-shaped still with its upturned spout.
And the distilling water for all Irish Distillers’ brands was to be drawn from the same fathomless underground caverns previously devoted exclusively to Paddy.
But some mystique remains. Nobody will specify the recipes for Irish whiskeys, except to say that there is never less than 60 per cent malted barley in the original mix. (By contrast, there may be rather less than 35 per cent malt whisky in the average blended Scotch.) And to rank the main brands in descending order of maltiness: Jameson (the export leader), Paddy (the Cork favourite), Power’s (the Irish best-seller) and Tullamore Dew (the personal choice of marketing manager Laurie Courtney).
Nevertheless, distilling techniques have been revolutionised by the five-million-gallons-a-year Midleton complex. Everything from the initial mash to the final vatting is strictly process-controlled. (There can be no recurrence of the 1947 still explosion that blew Sandy Ross clean through a window and into the yard leaving him wearing only his collar and tie and a gaberdine belt.) And the casks containing upwards of 13 million bottles-worth in its 14 warehouses are now labelled “light pot”, “mod pot” (for modified) and “all malt”.
Irish Distillers even blends by computer. Production planner Stan Parfitt controls two computer programmes, in fact. One in Dublin to co-ordinate production of the various old/new whiskeys, the other in London to locate whiskeys of the necessary ages, types and flavours for each blending. The casks are still “nosed” as a cross-check, though, and producing standard brands requires at least a three-week vatting to achieve a perfect marriage.
For the United States market Midleton also produces two ethnic brands that elderly Irish-Americans might remember from before Prohibition, when bootlegged Scotch helped fill the thirst vacuum. Dunphy’s and Hewitt’s have been lightened up and smoothed out to suit contemporary taste. Whiskey drinkers should watch out for Hewitt’s, which could puncture their self-esteem. It is a rather harsh and uncharacteristic Irish with a heavy malt “top flavour”.
Only one new Irish whiskey has failed. Reformed light Midleton Reserve was introduced in 1971 and taken off the market last year. “It was drunk by the wrong people,” an Irish spokesman explains. Not young trend-setters, but old die-hards who reckoned it wasn’t quite the real thing.
(Some pubs still had casks of the old unreformed Midleton malt, reserved for special occasions.) But otherwise the revolution has been successful. Selling at a premium, exports of Irish have multiplied five-fold to more than a million cases.
The success of Irish whiskey shouldn’t just be attributed to Dichter’s work, or his thoughts on smooth whiskey – he even cautioned against using the word smooth as it had been overused in advertising to the point that it lost all meaning. But his insights into the perceptions of Irish whiskey in the US were a foundation stone. Irish whiskey diehards may curse the persistence of smoothness as a descriptor in Irish whiskey marketing but it is the rock upon which this church is built – even the Irish whiskey technical file, the stone tablets of Irish whiskey production, uses the word smooth repeatedly, including one instance where smoothness is formally defined as an organoleptic characteristic of Irish whiskey –
“Irish Whiskey/Uisce Beatha Eireannach/Irish Whisky has great complexity of aroma, taste and silky smoothness. Irish Whiskey/Uisce Beatha Eireannach/Irish Whisky tends to be smooth, soft and mellow, with a range of flavours which could include fruity, honey, floral and woody flavours. They are famed for having a light and silky mouth feel.”
The producers who appeared in the last decade would suggest that we need to go back – that the heavy, more robust flavours of yore are a heritage which was either lost or stolen from us, depending on who you ask. And there absolutely is space for those flavours and styles, but the biggest brands are the ones who stick with Dichter’s dictum – smooth, approachable, easygoing liquid will never want for a home, in America or anywhere else.
Leave a Reply