Who is Victor Lebow?

The above quote is from Victor Lebow in a 1955 article from the Journal of Retailing (PDF here). Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee used it in her 20 minute film The Story of Stuff, which you can watch online Here, Provided that you have never been told what is wrong with the world in, like, a totally Valley-Girl accent before. Not much new in the film, but it fingers Victor Lebow as a mastermind of all evil today, which may or may not actually be so. Her film was written about in the New York Times in 2009, which generated a lot of interest in Victor Lebow, especially since no one else had really ever heard of him.

There exists today a really interesting thread here of bloggers, academics and commentators weighing in to collectively track this quote, and some of its misuses. Turns out Lebow may not have been the devil incarnate, the quote is out of context, and omits a few sentences in the middle. To find this information out though is a great story in itself involving photographing a microfilm screen, fire drills at a library, and third parties on the Internet carefully transcribing to bring out the full PDF.

I actually found Lebow's article quite astute. To put the above quote in context, I clipped what Lebow mentions just before. I have inserted #s and notes in [brackets].

Actually, there are three separate aspects from which competition should be viewed.
From the standpoint of the producer, anything that impedes the movement of goods or
services from his factory to the consumer constitutes competition. On the other hand, to the consumer competition is simply the multiplicity of choices available to him. Whether and how he acts upon these choices depends upon [1] the intensity of the wants that have been generated, [2] upon the limitations of his buying and borrowing powers, and [3] upon the customs, habits, and aspirations of his ethnic, social, or geographical group.

To the producer, competition is an irritant and a source of insecurity. Therefore, his drive is toward monopoly. Since every producer wants to remove the obstacles to the most profitable sale of the largest practical volume of his goods, his instinctive drive is to limit competition. The fact is that the essence of marketing strategy is to establish as many monopoly positions as possible. These may involve patents, trade- marks, style leaderships, exclusive arrangements of all kinds, the size of dominance of advertising and selling efforts, the extent to which the consumer’s emotional attitude towards his consumption can become the captive of the producer.

[Omitted here a paragraph on the importance of advertising, stressing the dominance in 1955 of television ads as a means to apply peer pressure.]

But what the retailer should see is that all of this pressure upon the consumer not only gives him innumerable choices, but actually strengthens his ability to reject the overwhelming proportion of the items proffered by our competitive economy. The total result of the pressure is to change the pattern of living. The persuasive techniques for instilling new wants into the consumer may result, in buying the new Hi-Fi set, or the new refrigerator, or the new car, and result also in displacing or postponing the purchase of clothes, or furniture, or vacation trips.

This leads to the third aspect of competition. It lies in the competition for the consumer’s attention, for his confidence, for his response to new wants.

It seems he is indicating that the peer pressure can be sculpted, and this was the mission of truly evil geniuses such as Edward Bernays, the Father of Public Relations who developed not only the Madison Avenue industry to do just that on TV, but also in politics. For more on Bernays, see my article from the Hairy Prone Companion. As for the competition for the consumer's attention, see Michael Goldhaber who has proposed an entire economy based on attention as possibly the last truly limited resource.

In context or out, misquoted or not, guilty or not, the words describe pretty well a completely manufactured and unnecessary problem most of us face every time we buy something.