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The motivation research of the 1940s and 1950s was an important precursor to the field of consumer behavior. Before the 1960s, as even a perusal of one of the encyclopedic marketing texts of the 1920s through 1950s will show (e.g. [6] Converse and Huegy, 1952), marketing covered a great many subjects, including ones today left to other disciplines (e.g. hedging) - yet it had almost nothing to say about consumer behavior. But largely outside the academic world the motivation research done in the 1940s and 1950s focused entirely on the consumer, attempting to explain why he or she did what they did. Motivation research laid many of the foundations for what became the discipline of consumer behavior, in particular a strong topical focus on the full scope consumer motivations, which were interpreted in light of findings from several of the social sciences - clinical psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
Some motivation researchers, e.g. Ernest Dichter, made extravagant claims of unfailing insight, which terrified many. Many scholars found motivation research ill-founded. The controversies that swirled around motivation research have been ably presented by [47] Tadajewski (2006). My focus here is on the research itself, which was considerably broader and more multi-faceted than conventional portraits of motivation research (e.g. Ernest Dichter) portray. I explore what the research uncovered - how it vastly enriched understanding of consumers - and how it kept developing under the public surface. After its time of great media attention from the mid- through late-1950s, motivation research seemed to disappear from public sight. I soon realized, however, that it did not disappear at all, but continued on, ever growing, in the work of marketing practitioners, and was developed by university researchers at a few major institutions - Harvard and the University of Chicago, for example.
In concluding a major monograph study of motivation research, Harvard's Joseph [41] Newman (1957) wrote:
In our examination of ... motivation research, we found a number of systematic efforts to make use of the behavioral fields ... Together, they constitute a movement, now young, which promises important conceptual growth and therefore appears destined to be a major landmark in the history of marketing ([41] Newman, 1957, p. 504).
Methodology
I used standard historical methodology ([17] Fullerton, 2011). In particular,...