Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  In the wake of totalitarian manipulation of the masses, and in the midst of Cold War debates about mind control, the omnipresence of adverts and the use of psychological techniques made advertising and marketing intensely controversial subjects of public debate. The dream worlds spun by advertisers seemed to have lodged themselves in the human psyche for good. In his popular One-dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse concluded that the ‘mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself . . . and his society’. It was, Marcuse added, ‘an (unfortunately fantastic) example’.140

  There are two classic accounts of the rise of marketing. The first treats the post-war era as a new dawn, where a homogeneous mass market gave way to differentiation and market segmentation. The second tells a story of how adverts and marketing techniques moved beyond the marketplace, taking over all spheres of life.141 Marketing, in this view, started to colonize society and politics, recasting citizens as customers: the advertising wave of post-war affluence prepared the ground for the neo-liberal 1990s.

  Both these accounts are too simple. Market segmentation and efforts to differentiate between customers were well under way in America in the inter-war years. The ‘mass market’ was never monolithic. The mail-order giant Sears was already classifying its customers on the eve of the First World War. After the war, department stores began to experiment with ‘customer control’. This technique was driven by credit departments, which compiled ledgers of inactive customers and then targeted them directly to lure them back to the store. Managers knew that customers who used credit tended to spend more. Stores kept index cards with tabs to indicate whether customers had bought hats or shoes, at what cost and time of year, at which branch, and whether they were married or single. Instead of just checking accounts, credit managers moved into the business of promoting sales. In the 1930s, the punch card and data processing arrived, which enabled shops to segment customers by income. In Britain, market research was distinguishing people by the class of paper they were reading – The Times was ‘A’, Good Housekeeping ‘D’. Personalized sales had entered the mass market.142

  After the war and austerity, advertising expenditure grew fast; the 1950s and ’60s, after all, were decades of phenomenal growth. But a longer perspective suggests it is misleading to see the post-war era of affluence as some sudden take-off into the stratosphere. In the United States, advertising’s share of GDP was above 2 per cent throughout the inter-war years, and peaked at 3 per cent in the early 1920s. Notwithstanding the glamour today associated with admen in the 1950s and ’60s, at no point did these years manage to reach that high point. What changed was the type of advertising and the goods it promoted. In the years around 1900, most advertising was in newspapers or via mail order. The dominant product was patent medicine. By the 1970s, American firms spent almost as much on TV adverts as on newspapers. The leading products now were cars, toiletries, food, beer and alcohol.

  Nor did commercial and pop-psychological techniques inexorably sweep all before them. In the early years, advertisers were widely criticized for lowering aesthetic taste and despoiling the landscape. In pre-1914 Germany, they were attacked for promoting ‘Jewish’ techniques or being American and vulgar. The great historian of capitalism Sombart thought advertising was throwing money down the drain, as well as fraudulent and ruining good German taste. Local authorities objected that loud posters and night-time advertising were devastating town and countryside. To establish their credentials, advertisers needed allies in art and design. In Cologne, they collaborated with the Werkbund, the modernist association of artists and architects. Advertising, they told their critics, was about more than profit: it would be the cultural educator of the masses.143 In America, the first courses in marketing appeared at universities in 1900. But, in reality, marketing never managed to put itself on a scientific footing. Most practitioners were practical men, not psychologists. There was a lot of trial and error. American agencies developed cutting-edge techniques, but when they reached Europe they had to be adapted to fit local markets and customs. A lot of knowledge was home grown. J. W. Thompson’s London office accepted that they were working in a market where class mattered more than on Madison Avenue. Dichter himself opened an office in London in 1957, only to find that his techniques did not work there. In spite of their growing affluence, Britons, he despaired, were puritanical and did not use products to express themselves. Most firms never fully subscribed to ‘motivational research’ and remained openly sceptical of anything that smacked of subliminal manipulation.144

  Rather than seeing marketing moving outward in one direction – from market to society – its success depended on a cross-fertilization with state and society. Market research became credible because it intersected with a more general advance of a whole variety of related forms of social research: mass observation, opinion polling, expenditure surveys, audience research and, also, direct attempts by the state to understand their citizens better in order to promote healthy or national products. The US Department of Commerce launched its own market research series in 1929. In Britain, there were marketing boards for milk and imperial goods which conducted research better to understand and shape buying behaviour. There was a revolving door between state departments and advertising agencies. It was a commercial–state– social-science research complex.145

  What is remarkable in this general picture is how diverse the presence of advertising continues to be in similarly affluent societies. Intensity and visibility vary considerably. In the United States in 1980, advertising spend per person was more than double that in Japan or Germany and four times that in Italy. Interestingly, it was Switzerland and Finland that came closest to American levels.146 Where ads appeared also continued to diverge. In the US, Australia and Britain in the 1990s, a third of ad spend was for television. In Scandinavian countries, it was a mere 14 per cent. Most advertising continued to be in newspapers north of the Alps but, south on television. This may partly have to do with different shares of commercial stations and public providers, but it may equally reflect the fact that Northern Europeans do more reading for leisure and (still) have a more vibrant newspaper scene.147

  To expand, goods need to be able to cross frontiers. With their emphasis on pleasure and experience, advertisers, market researchers and youth subcultures crossed an inner psychological frontier, as important as external territorial ones. Consumption now was acknowledged, indeed endorsed, as a way to reach deep into one’s identity and libido. Some recent writers have suggested that, today, we live in a new ‘experience society’. Things no longer matter primarily for what they do but for how they make us feel. Sports shoes and spectacles in all sorts of designs and colours are obvious examples. Affluence, according to this view, was a historic break with a system dominated by basic needs – before the post-war miracle, societies were preoccupied with utility; since, with feelings.148

  This is dubious history. It underestimates the continuing importance of materiality; smart phones and skateboards need to work as well as feel good. It also ignores the longer history of emotional needs. For all his blindspots, Dichter (like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the sociologist L. T. Hobhouse before him) was right to recognize that all societies, rich and poor, have emotional relationships with goods. Early economists had not altogether ignored the role of feelings. Hermann Gossen formulated his laws of pleasure in 1854 out of a realization that much human activity was not about filling the stomach but about avoiding boredom.149 Alongside ‘defensive’ goods (bread, for example), which gave instant satiation, there were ‘creative’ ones (such as music or travel) to which people turned in anticipation of pleasure to come. These were ‘experience’ goods. Each pleasure, Gossen believed, had its own optimal frequency, maintained by greater or lesser repetition. What the 1950s and ’60s did was to expand the range of frequencies. At one end, change
accelerated, as in men’s fashion. At the other end, however, new routine experiences sprang up. Week after week, for almost four years in the late 1950s, Italians tuned into the same evening game show: Lascia o raddoppia? The American The Price is Right ran from 1956 to ’65, the German Was Bin Ich? soldiered on until 1989. Familiarity and novelty needed each other.

  From this longer perspective, 1968 appears in the story of consumption as a climax rather than a sharp break, let alone a revolution. The material self had been growing. Now, pleasure became a right, and clothes, cars and pop music ways to exercise it. Some groups attacked consumption as a subliminal weapon of capitalist domination which, by planting artificial needs, reduced the masses to passive spectators. For the Situationist International, only spontaneous ‘situations’ and ironic actions, such as dressing up as Santa Claus and distributing teddy bears outside toy stores, could restore freedom and creativity. At the Sorbonne in Paris in May 1968, one poster declared that the ‘consumer’s society must perish of a violent death . . . Imagination is seizing power.’150 For the vast majority of young people, however, consumer society was not a pressing issue.151 Even English ‘drop-outs’, Dutch provos and German Gammler – small groups who had exchanged their apprenticeships for freedom – insisted on their right to enjoy drink, drugs and the latest record.152 Some communes encouraged sympathizers to practise shop-lifting. It was a boycott of the cash register rather than of consumer goods.

  The most violent attack took place in Frankfurt. On 2 April 1968, fire bombs with timers went off in two department stores, destroying some toys and sports equipment. Even this, however, needs to be placed in perspective. The incident was trivial compared to the Cairo Fire in 1952, when nationalists set fire to six department stores and seven hundred shops, dance halls and other properties. The context of the German bombing was American imperialism and the war in Vietnam. A year earlier, on 22 May 1967, 322 people had died in a fire in the Brussels store Innovation. The cause was probably electrical, but the fact that it broke out during an American fashion show, with protests over Vietnam outside, raised suspicions of politically motivated arson. In Berlin, the Kommune I, the first political commune, founded in January 1967, distributed flyers that presented the disaster as a ‘new gag in the versatile history of American advertising’, which had hit on the idea of burning the customer himself. When, they wondered, might someone discreetly light a cigarette in a changing room and set alight the KaDeWe department store or Woolworth, so that Berlin could share the burning feeling of Hanoi?153

  The real bombs a year later failed to ignite a broader conflict over consumer culture. Arguably, they helped extinguish it. The subsequent trial escalated into a self-destructive stand-off between terrorists and the state. The bombers, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, saw themselves as fighting a war against Konsumterror : ‘Consumerism terrorizes you, we terrorize the goods.’ In their attitude to goods, as in their use of force, they could not have been further from Gandhi. ‘I also like cars and all the things one can buy in department stores,’ Ensslin said. ‘But when one has to buy them so that one does not gain consciousness, then the price is too high.’154 Consumption was fine as long as radicals did not have to pay for it. Ensslin appeared in court in a shiny red leather jacket. Baader modelled himself on the French film star Jean-Paul Belmondo and appreciated night-clubs and fine clothes; during his stay at Hans Werner Henze’s house in Rome, he liberally helped himself to the composer’s silk shirts. When he was finally caught, in a speed trap, it was behind the wheel of a 300hp Iso Rivolta; earlier cars included a white Mercedes 220SE and a Ford Fairlane, with tail-fins. He was closer to Dichter’s American consumer than to a Maoist peasant.

  Ensslin was the daughter of a Swabian pastor and a typical example of youth culture’s challenge to hierarchies. Anti-authoritarian politics worked with consumer culture rather than against it. Private pleasure became a revolutionary principle; in the famous words of one German communard, his orgasm mattered more to him than Vietnam.155 Soixante-huitards, or 68ers, had very little to say about the impact of their lifestyle on producers. For all the critique of ‘consumer society’, they accepted choice and self-fashioning, even reinforced it. Some radicals were fearful of ‘selling out’ and urged simplicity. Most, though, saw popular music and colourful clothes as vehicles of self-realization. For youth movements, this was a major change in direction. Around 1900, organized youth had turned to woods and mountains to escape commercial leisure and stimulants. Now they seized the latter pair as routes of liberation.

  Consumer culture and radical culture lived together openly. In Berlin, the model Uschi Obermaier moved into Kommune 1, drank Coke and smoked Reyno; she had no interest in revolutionary texts, she confessed. Exotic fashion was part of anti-establishment politics. At criminal trials, 68ers, fresh from boarding school, appeared in green jackets and light blue trousers. That fashion and music could be turned to radical use shook at the foundations of the Marxist position that the culture industries were instruments of alienation and control. Activists might have Adorno and Marcuse on their shelves, but their lifestyle belied the thesis that ‘technological society’ had created a ‘one-dimensional man’, pacified through the ‘repressive needs’ created by entertainment, advertising and illusions of comfort.156 To believe in self-actualization implied that individuals were able to evaluate the goods on offer and make their own choices. Radical magazines featured adverts from car and drink manufacturers. In counter-cultural literature, Donald Duck appeared next to Mao.157

  The potential of such affinities was not lost on business. Barely a year after the 1968 revolts, counter-cultural shirts and dresses were hanging in department stores. The soixante-huitards may have scored anti-authoritarian successes in family life and education. As far as their material appetite was concerned, however, they continued where their parents had left off. Beards saved a few razor-blades. Communes turned orange crates into shelves. Some feminists burnt their bras, and early hippies gave away their watches. Yet, overall, the new generation was resource hungry. In New York, some young families joined together as communes but kept their personal cleaners and private showers: the air-conditioning was always on.158 In Germany, in 1974, a researcher was surprised to find a greater number of TVs, stereos and washers and driers in communal ‘alternative’ flats than in conventional households; some flats had three cars.159 Shared use, then, did not automatically entail simple living. Perversely, it could have the opposite effect, justifying the purchase of more appliances to avoid conflict over who controlled the TV or stereo.

  By 1973, when the oil crisis hit, consumer culture was thus firmly entrenched. Critical voices did not disappear. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet and filmmaker, lamented that television and cars had flattened customs and classes into the same materialist monoculture; the ‘craving to consume’ had led to a ‘new fascism’, degrading the Italian popolo far more than in Mussolini’s day – rather downplaying the way in which leisure had been manipulated under Il Duce.160 In France, Jean Baudrillard offered a new critique of consumer society as a total system of signs, in which people lived under a kind of magical spell, no longer choosing goods for their practical utility but for the images and messages they conveyed. As these were infinite, the system generated a continuous longing for more: ‘affluence is . . . merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness.’161 In 1972, the Club of Rome – a group of scientists, businessmen and professionals – published its first report, warning that in a world of finite resources there were limits to growth. In the Soviet Bloc, too, there were some sceptics. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had read the Club’s report, in 1974 urged the leaders of the USSR to abandon a self-destructive path of greed and progress and return to small towns, gardens and silence.162

  However noble, such views no longer held sway in either East or West. The centre of political gravity had shifted. In the previous decades, Conservatives had swapped their anti-modernism for family-oriented consumerism. Even Charles de Gaulle,
for all his antipathy to America as a society without history, sponsored what one historian has called ‘domestic Americanization’.163 Social Democrats eventually accepted, however grudgingly, that workers wanted private comforts as well as work and welfare. Further left, European intellectuals rediscovered America, with its lifestyle communities, as the vanguard of revolution.164 Instead of denouncing consumer culture as a method of oppression, writers like Michel de Certeau in 1974 presented shopping and eating as everyday practices where little people could regain some control of their lives through cunning, ‘ruses’ and ‘making do’. In the next decade, the anthropologist Mary Douglas and the historian Simon Schama began to appreciate consumption as an integral part of the social system and of the creation of meaning, solidarity and identity, while scholars in gender studies rescued female shoppers from oblivion.165

  A similar opening is perceptible among American civil rights activists. In the 1950s, Martin Luther King had warned that big cars were distracting African-Americans from God. By the 1960s, he preached a different theme: the evil was poverty in the midst of plenty. Poor whites needed to join hands with African-Americans. King came to recognize that his followers had material aspirations, and for civic as much as personal reasons: big cars won respect. Everyone craved distinction. The danger was when the ‘drum major instinct’ was not ‘harnessed’ but allowed to take over, prompting people to go on a spending spree to ‘outdo the Joneses’, to boast, lie and become snobs.166

  For those at the margins, access to goods meant social inclusion and a sense of dignity. In the late 1960s, thousands of welfare recipients took to American streets to fight for their right to credit cards.167 The closest anyone in power came to reviving an older moralism was President Jimmy Carter during the oil crisis. ‘We’ve learned,’ he told television viewers in 1979, ‘that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.’168 Even for Carter, however, the solution did not lie with a curb on consumption. His two main conclusions were that Americans needed to have faith and that, in future, increased demands for energy should be met by domestic sources, including 20 per cent from solar power by 2000. Americans got the former, not the latter; in 2014, solar power produced barely 0.5 per cent of electricity.169