The brand image — in this case, a smiling Quaker — substituted the real human with a mythological one, carefully designed to appeal to us more than a living person could. Just as the goods of industry were considered better by virtue of their freedom from human hands, our relationships with the idealized brands of consumer culture were meant to surpass anything we could establish with an imperfect fellow human. Human relationships are so messy and personal. Brand relationships are almost platonic ideals. Clean, abstract, and impersonal.
To pull that off, producers turned again to technology: Mass production may have led to mass marketing, but then mass marketing required mass media to reach the actual masses. We may like to think that radio and TV were invented so entertainers could reach bigger audiences, but the proliferation of broadcast media was designed to enable America’s new national brands to reach consumers from coast to coast. Consumer culture was born, and media technologies became the main ways to persuade people to desire possessions over relationships and social status over social connections. The less fruitful the relationships in a person’s life, the better target they are for synthetic ones.