By the middle of the twentieth century, corporate marketing had become a growing professional field and marketing experts increasingly shaped the way in which American companies understood their customers. No longer focused solely on sales and advertising, professional marketing increasingly entailed a broad array of business functions from product development and design to pricing and distribution. Marketing departments grew in number and size, and they increasingly relied on systematic market research to develop merchandise that fit changing consumer tastes. An entire new group of professional experts had appeared, offering their services as advertising consultants, market analysts, and market prognosticators to the consumer goods industry. As a “social technology,” marketing now aimed not only at understanding consumers and analyzing their needs but also at shaping their desires. Especially since the economic crisis of the 1930s, marketers traded on the promise that they could socially “engineer” consumers and their behavior. 1
The ascendancy of the “mad men” in mid-twentieth-century America—made famous more recently by the popular television series—has already received attention from historians. 2 Throughout the postwar boom years, the advertising industry on Madison Avenue developed novel ways of appealing to segments of the populace—from youths to African Americans—that had not previously been specifically targeted as consumers . Advertisers attempted to probe ever more deeply and consciously into the minds and psychological motivations of consumers. 3 Already in the 1920s, the rise of professional U.S. advertising agencies had a transatlantic dimension, and historians of European business have discussed the American agencies as spearheads of an “Americanization” of European marketing. 4 Yet these (m)ad men on Madison Avenue were but the tip of the iceberg for a broader shift in modern marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, which saw professionalized and increasingly creative approaches in areas ranging from market research and industrial design to corporate sales strategies and retail presentation. Looking beyond the (m)ad men employed by advertising agencies, we can find a broad array of expert professionals who as commercial designers, consumer psychologists, sales managers, or market researchers contributed to the rise of new systematic and creative forms of consumer-oriented marketing. These experts confidently saw themselves as “consumer engineers,” selling their services and an enticing world of goods to consumers and corporations alike.
Marketing increasingly dissociated itself from older notions of educating people on how to make use of new products. Advertising gradually turned away from pure technical instructions and simple accentuations of a good’s quality and benefits. Increasingly, marketing tried to touch the consumer emotionally, stressing the added values of social distinction, aesthetic appeal, and satisfaction of desires. The attempt to reach consumers at the level of their unconscious wishes and inner motivations required a new toolbox of social research methods and psychological analysis. The basic intention of consumer research , gathering information to better understand consumer behavior, was at times superseded by attempts at manipulating consumers. The rise of innovative research and the roots of marketing professionalization in part intersected with an overblown belief in the power of psychological methods to direct and control consumer behavior. The disparate nature of this transitional phase in the history of marketing has often been noted in the literature, but never systematically analyzed. The intention of this book is to give more concrete contours to this period of “consumer engineering.”
We locate its beginnings within the interwar era with its crises and technocratic reform responses on both sides of the Atlantic. Consumer Engineering: A New Technology for Prosperity was the title of a 1932 book by two prominent U.S. marketing experts, Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens. 5 As commercial designers and advertising men, the authors urged American businesses to overcome the Great Depression by creating consumer demand with concerted marketing efforts, for example, by consciously integrating industrial design or state-of-the-art psychological research into marketing strategies. The streamlined shapes of 1930s industrial goods reflected their agenda as much as the motivation research or the subliminal psychology of advertising appeals did in subsequent decades. Consumer engineering, to its cheerleaders, promised to increase sales and usher in a period of abundance and “adjusted life” in newfound affluence. Increasingly intricate market research and the exploration of consumer psychology aimed directly at “making goods desirable” and at inducing change in taste and “obsolescence.” 6 Consumer engineering claimed to put “the consumer” and his or her wishes ever more directly at the center of corporate marketing strategies by offering a wider range of products, pricing, and carefully tailored advertising. This understanding advanced a paradigm shift from narrowly conceived production-led strategies toward more consumer-oriented marketing management that—for the first time—took consumer needs and desires seriously as an important market factor.
Consumer engineering’s cautious beginnings in the interwar years ushered in a period of self-assured marketing expansion after World War II. To their postwar critics, the consumer engineers were nothing more than “hidden persuaders” who manipulated consumers into a rat race of unending consumption through accelerated product cycles and “planned obsolescence.” 7 Mid-century merchandising, however, did not simply amount to corporate brainwashing but instead reflected a newfound belief in the power of professional marketing. Marketers now claimed they possessed the tools to avert market saturation and other forms of crisis. Sophisticated professional methods, consumer engineers claimed, would allow them to predict and even shape consumer behavior almost at will. With expanding full-service advertising agencies, new design studios, and market research laboratories and marketing departments emerging at consumer goods corporations, the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s came to represent a kind of “golden age” of self-confident modern marketing that ultimately reached beyond the United States to affect the entire Atlantic World.
The object of this volume is to transcend the familiar, but increasingly barren debate between proponents of advertising and mass consumption, who saw a vehicle for democratic capitalism, and detractors of the new marketing practices, who saw nothing more than consumer manipulation. 8 Instead, we ask more broadly about how and to what degree modern marketing managed to shape consumption practices and the culture of mass consumption, and in what ways marketing was merely a response to wider social and cultural dynamics. Simply put, did marketing shape the market or did the social dynamics of the market shape the marketing concepts? We seek to reassess the history of consumer engineering in a comparative and transnational framework that views the rise of marketing as part of a broader mid-century era of “high modernity,” or what might be called the “age of engineers,” which spans from the interwar decades to the 1960s. 9 At a time when experts and technocrats were engaged in schemes to manage and change politics, society, and the economy based on an optimistic belief in the power of sciences and social sciences, marketing professionals were but one group among many engaged in attempts to “engineer” social relations. We still do not know much about their motives, methods, and professional self-perceptions, however. We therefore need to put the key economic actors and professions firmly at the center of historical research.
Exploring the work of store and product designers or the strategies of fashion or automobile companies, a more ambiguous picture of consumer engineering emerges. What critics saw as marketing manipulation can also be seen as part of a mid-century celebration of the potential of the sciences and the call for economic predictability through the steering of aggregate and individual demand. Corporate market making, Andrew Godley and Keith Heron suggest in their chapter, entailed genuine attempts to establish trust and goodwill between consumers and corporations in order to make consumer markets function. Thus, we transcend both the focus on advertising prevalent in earlier studies of corporate marketing and the narrow issue of whether merchandisers meet or manipulate demand. 10 Instead, we look at the specific goals of innovators, at the challenges and problems faced by consumer product firms as they engaged increasingly stratified and fragmented consumer markets, and at the complex efforts of consumer movements to respond to marketing innovations.
Consumer Engineering as a Phase in Marketing in the United States and Europe
Mid-century consumer engineering emerges as a distinct phase of acceleration and professionalization in a longer history of consumer marketing and an increasingly “fast capitalism” since the late nineteenth century. Looking at developed consumer societies in North America and Europe, especially at mid-century, the essays in this volume address four interrelated sets of issues pertaining to the scope, periodization, and character of consumer engineering, as well to its broader implications for business and social history in the transatlantic world.
First, we examine how changing notions of “the consumer” among marketing professionals impacted marketing developments in particular and modern consumer culture more generally. Tracing the history of efforts to engineer consumers and looking at the proponents and detractors of this work sheds new light on the development of mass consumption in the transatlantic world during the crucial period between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the multiple crises of the 1970s. Wedged between these two dramatic downturns in economic development were both the global catastrophe of World War II and the “miraculous” postwar boom years, which both in their own way contributed to an unparalleled expansion of mass consumption across the Atlantic World. 11
This book emphasizes the important linkages between interwar and postwar marketing developments. It identifies a longer, mid-century period of “high modernity” in marketing, which was characterized by a sustained belief in the powers of science, technology, and planning to bring about widespread improvements in living conditions, an abundance of material goods, and continuously new and improved consumer products. Such notions coalesced with a specific Fordist mode of consumption based on household rationalization and mass-produced durable goods. This model of high modernist mass consumption, many economists and policy makers hoped at the time, would be the engine of perpetual growth, and marketing would thus provide a valuable social service. 12 This was the world in which consumer engineers rose to prominence. While historians have long focused on mass production as a central pillar of the mass consumption economy, new approaches to mass marketing from product merchandising to retailing and financing were equally important. What impact did the professionalization of market research, industrial design, and other aspects of modern marketing have on mid-century mass consumption? And what role was attributed to “the consumer” within a broader framework of technocratic high modernity?
Second, the emergence of consumer engineering and the professionalization of marketing were not particular to American consumer capitalism, as is so often assumed in works that posit marketing as a central facet of “Americanization.” 13 These trends need to be placed in a transatlantic context instead, so we ask about transnational transfers of marketing ideas and practices between Europe and the United States and vice versa. What impact, for example, did new consumer engineering practices have on European economies at a time when American consumer culture was making cross-Atlantic inroads in the context of the Cold War? Only a few studies have thus far traced the transatlantic diffusion of marketing practices and know-how at the company level. Postwar marketing has only recently attracted the attention of European business history. The present volume significantly adds to this literature by studying both the multidirectional transfers of marketing ideas and their concrete, practical application. 14 Who were the principal actors involved in relaying marketing innovations? How did expert discourses translate into marketing practices at the company level?
Third, understood as a distinct phase of transatlantic marketing history, consumer engineering represented a shift toward “scient...