Stefan Schwarzkopf

The Consumer as ‘‘Voter,’’ ‘‘Judge,’’ and ‘‘Jury’’: Historical Origins and Political Consequences of a Marketing Myth

This article discusses the origins of the idea that a consumer’s choice is equivalent to a citizen’s vote or a juror’s verdict and that markets therefore resemble the political process of a democracy. The idea of the consumer as sovereign driver of the marketplace emerged during the enlightenment. It was, however, the development of market research methods during the 1930s and 1940s, which provided the crucial backdrop for the sudden rise to prominence of an idea that assumes that consumers dictate what is produced through their ‘‘votes,’’ that is, daily choices. Innovations in the measurement of consumer preferences, such as consumer juries, panel surveys, and the program analyzer technique, provided the final touch of scientific credibility to this idea. An understanding of the historical origins and political—philosophical implications of the equation of consumer markets and democracies is of importance for the study of macromarketing because it helped legitimize specific industries that today have come under closer scrutiny for their potentially detrimental impact on the social welfare of consumers, such as the advertising and the entertainment industries. This equation also provided—and still provides—a theoretical underpinning for the marketing concept as a marketing management philosophy.

The Political Theology of Consumer Sovereignty Towards an Ontology of Consumer Society

The article analyses the common notion that the consumer society is a reflection of those principles in the market that also provide the ideas of democracy and liberal constitutionalism with legitimacy in the political realm. The inalienable right to self-development and self-determination makes the individual the starting and ending point of life, rendering all spheres of market and society a ‘republic of choice’. But if consumer society shares the essentials of liberal constitutionalism and the rational, processual nature of democratic representation, then its ontology needs to be investigated for the same reason and in the same manner as legal and political philosophy dissects the legitimacy and validity of the parliamentary institutions of modern democracy. Just as in the political philosophy of the constitutional structure of the democratic state, the question of who is sovereign is key to understanding the ontology of consumer society. But rather than simply placing sovereignty into the hands of the independent, self-determined consumer, the earliest ontologists of the consumer society took recourse to medieval political theology and presented the consumer market as a new corpus mysticum. Thus, it is medieval political theology, not modern liberal thought, which provided for an ontologization of the consumer. This, in turn, directly pertains to the questions of the legitimacy of consumer society per se, of consumer decisions in particular and of their sources of legitimacy.

The subsiding sizzle of advertising history Methodological and theoretical challenges in the post advertising age

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an overview over the development of historical research into advertising from the early twentieth century. Its main purposes are to interest marketing scholars and business historians in the history of advertising, help scholars that are unfamiliar with the field in choosing an appropriate theoretical and methodological angle, and provide a critique of a range of methods and theoretical approaches being applied in advertising historical research.Design/methodology/approach – The research design of this paper is based on historiographical analysis and method critique. It surveys the advertising historical literature of the three decades between 1980 and 2010, and it compares and contrasts dominant research methodologies and theoretical paradigms that have been used by historians and advertising researchers.Findings – Much advertising historical research is based on a specific set of theoretical paradigms (“Modernization”, “Americanization”, and “Semiotics”), without bei...

They do it with Mirrors: Advertising and British Cold War Consumer Politics

During the Cold War, advertising became a politically and culturally sensitive area fiercely contested by the two political camps. The champions of socialist planning and state-funded consumer protection dismissed advertising as a wasteful and ‘evil’ form of mass deception. Advocates of the advertising industry, however, promoted their business as an essential part of a ‘free’ society. New methods of consumer research and controversial advertising techniques led to clashes between representatives of both camps over questions of consumer citizenship and advertising regulation. In order to contain calls for more regulation of the industry, the Advertising Association launched centrally co-ordinated pro-advertising public relations campaigns which utilised the Cold War language of ‘freedom’ vs. ‘totalitarianism’.

The market order as metaphysical loot: Theology and the contested legitimacy of consumer capitalism

The mechanism through which the ideology of market capitalism emerged has mostly been interpreted as part of an incremental, inevitable, and thus legitimate ousting of theological concepts from a public sphere that became organized around the principles of the Enlightenment as a secular project. This article stresses the illegitimate aspects of this process, that is the expropriation and re-appropriation of theological devices and ideas for what was merely an alternative political-theological project. This project, namely the establishment of the priesthood of the individualized ‘common man’, allowed for the mobilization of individual choice as a principle of social organization. The same process was responsible for underpinning the often unjust and illiberal market order with the vision of the world as an ordered and benign kosmos that emerged spontaneously from chaos.

From Fordist to creative economies: the de-Americanisation of European advertising cultures since the 1960s

European advertising, its aesthetics, institutions and its central organisations, the advertising agencies, were profoundly changed by the arrival of American advertising agencies during the inter-war period. Supported by industrial clients who demanded global communications campaigns, and based on new forms of professional advertising management, these agencies soon dominated the course of European advertising history. During the 1960s, the influence of American advertising agencies began to wane, and global advertising increasingly followed new trends that originated in Europe. This article searches for the origins of this remarkable change of direction. In doing so, it compares the cultural-economic development of major European advertising industries from the immediate post-war years to the twenty-first century. It can be shown that the European advertising industries followed ‘non-American’ pathways in their development, which combined an emphasis on creativity with radically new forms of advertising production and agency management. As a result, successful advertising agencies today look less like American full-service agencies, and much more like the smaller European agencies of the type that had emerged between the world wars. The article discusses these findings in the light of the often-applied term ‘Americanisation’.

Markets, Consumers, and the State: The Uses of Market Research in Government and the Public Sector in Britain, 1925–1955

Business historians have developed a lively interest in the various roles that states played in the emergence of stable economic institutions. The state as an institutional actor helps enforce contractual commitments, property rights, and regulatory frameworks. An additional role of the state, which comes into focus here, is as a provider of goods and services. Inasmuch as these goods and services—like transport, healthcare, infrastructure, utilities, fuel, education, telecommunications, information, and entertainment—have to meet the needs of trade customers and citizens as their consumers, the state has to engage in information-gathering activities that help ascertain the specific needs of customers and citizens. In addition, it has to define ways to meet these needs in the most efficient and cost-effective way in order to ensure a “fit” between policies and end-consumers so that market actors can link up efficiently with lower search costs and risks (opportunity costs).

Marketing, Realism, and Reality: A Plea for Putting More ‘‘Ideology’’ into Historical Research in Marketing

The first part of this response to Eric Shaw’s commentary, ‘‘Marketing Myths and Marketing Realities,’’ seeks to clarify misunderstandings that undermine the interpretation of the arguments originally made in the ‘‘The Consumer as Voter, Judge and Jury.’’ The second part deals with the causes and consequences of Shaw’s attempt to rescue ‘‘realism’’ for ‘‘marketing science.’’

Ernest Dichter, Motivation Research and the ‘Century of the Consumer’

The autumn of 1938 was stormy and violent. All over the world, there was an air of anticipation, an atmosphere also filled with anxiety and uncertainty. Commentators in East and West divined change, disruption and upheaval. In Europe, many people desperately clung on to the hope of ‘peace in our time’ as Nazi Germany had enforced a political union with Austria (Anschluss) and now threatened to invade Czechoslovakia. In November, hundreds of synagogues and the shops and homes of thousands of Jewish people in Germany were burnt to the ground in murderous riots orchestrated by the Nazi regime. In the same year, the concentration camps Mauthausen and Neuengamme were opened. In late September, the notorious ‘Long Island Express’ hurricane struck Connecticut, New York, Long Island and Massachusetts. It damaged or destroyed 57,000 homes and buildings, knocked down 3 billion trees and left a path of devastation in which nearly 700 people lost their lives.

CREATIVITY, CAPITAL AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

This article discusses the role of creativity, graphic design innovations and tacit knowledge within advertising agency competition processes during the first half of the twentieth century. This period witnessed the arrival of the ‘advertising creative’: the artist-designer, whose output and tacit understanding of consumer tastes became key for the competitive advantage of agencies. Adapting Bourdieus concept of the social field within which actors create and trade various forms of capital, I show how and why William Crawfords advertising agency in London became a pioneer in promoting the social, cultural and economic role of this new group of agency workers. I argue that Crawfords became the first advertising agency that carved out a unique position within a highly competitive market by defining its visual production and organisational identity entirely through notions of creativity. This places Crawfords at the heart of the emergence of a cultural economy for which creative skills are a paramount source of value creation.