Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism
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Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226660295 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The Origins of "Consumer Engineering":
Interwar Consumer Capitalism in Transatlantic Perspective
In January 1930, German graphic designer Lucian Bernhard contributed a lengthy article on the importance of "beauty" for American industry to a brand-new section of the trade journal Advertising and Selling. Manufacturers, Bernhard claimed, had long focused exclusively on efficiency in engineering and on the mechanics of production; outside of advertising art, they were reluctant to let artists and other outsiders meddle in their business. Yet, he noted, even if the consumer desire for good design was still "quite unconscious," an increasing demand for beauty in commercial goods could be expected. Advertisers, he advised, should turn to style as a "new angle of distinction" now that the technical performance of a given product could be taken for granted. Bernhard called on industry to embrace a "new school of artists" who were willing and equipped to bring their art to merchandise. In a buyer's market, new experts were needed to help companies market more desirable goods.
In essence, Bernhard made the case for bringing a new group of "consumer engineers" into American marketing. Also in 1930, advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins wrote about the need for "consumption engineering" as a new "business science" that would combine market research with consumer-oriented design innovations to create new demand by means of "artificial obsolescence." Advertising executives and sales managers, to be sure, had long seen themselves as expert professionals analyzing consumer markets. The psychology of buyers and the aesthetics of commercial goods and advertising had been prominent topics in professional circles during the early decades of the twentieth century. The collapse of demand during the Great Depression, however, lent new urgency to marketing efforts geared at appealing to consumers. Advocates of consumer engineering wanted to make existing marketing practice more systematic. At the same time, they became receptive to outside experts, looking to the worlds of academia and modern art.
American business, Lucian Bernhard furthermore argued, also needed to look to Europe for inspiration. Some U.S. advertisers, he believed, had already caught on: "For years advertising agencies have been watching with keen interest the development of this 'art in industry' movement, especially in Germany, France and Austria ... European efforts to create a new beauty in machine products have pointed the way to new life in industrial merchandising." Bernhard's own transatlantic career was a testament to the vibrant interwar exchanges in the commercial arts. He had been a prominent poster artist in Germany before and during World War I and one of the pioneers of modernist "object posters" for brand goods and war loans alike. By the mid-1920s, Bernhard had relocated to New York City where he eventually became a partner in Contempora Studio, producing graphic arts and interior designs. The history of interwar marketing is usually written in terms of the "Americanization" of European advertising or of the European reception of Fordist mass consumption. Analyzing the debates surrounding consumer engineering, by contrast, demonstrates the reciprocity of Atlantic crossings in interwar marketing with regard to elements of design and of the psychology of consumption.
This chapter thus pursues a twofold aim. First, it contextualizes the notion of "consumer engineering" within broader developments in interwar marketing and mass consumption. The impact of marketing innovations in styling and consumer psychology can only be understood before the backdrop of an American consumer society, which already had developed sophisticated mechanisms of mass production and distribution. Retailers and advertisers in particular had accumulated a specialized body of sales expertise on which a new generation of marketing professionals could build. As the Depression hit, a range of further factors contributed to the spread of consumer engineering efforts. The systematic creation of demand now became of interest to industry and the state alike. In addition, prevailing technocratic approaches to government and management favored the rise of "scientific" methods as well as of experts of all stripes. Interwar preoccupation with efficiency and rationalization of social and economic processes, finally, dovetailed with a circumscribed but growing fascination with modernist forms and functionalist designs, part of a broader aestheticization of American commercial culture.
Much more than often assumed, secondly, this was a transatlantic story. Interwar Americans still looked to Europe, especially when it came to innovations in style and design or to the psychological appeal of consumer goods and luxury products. While American goods and advertisers indeed spread across the globe during the 1920s, European metropolitan centers in many ways held their own with regard to retail facilities and modern methods of sales and advertising. Focusing on Germany and Central Europe in particular, the chapter traces European marketing developments during the interwar years. What set European marketing apart early on was the prominent role of public actors and state institutions with regard to consumption as well as an emphasis on social reform among various new experts engaged in commercial design and consumer research. When some of these European experts in design and social research were forced out of Europe by the rise of National Socialism, they brought new marketing knowledge to the United States. As consumer engineers, the emigrés intensified an already ongoing "cross-cultural fertilization," to use emigré intellectual Paul Tillich's term. Their knowledge of design and consumer psychology promised to be adaptable to American midcentury efforts in social and consumer engineering by state and industry alike.
The "Horn of Plenty": The Emergence of Mass Marketing in the United States
"What is wrong with the horn of plenty?" Sheldon and Arens asked their readers in 1932. Like a generous cornucopia, American industry had been providing food and furniture, clothing and automobiles in never before seen quantities, leading straight into the Great Depression. While industrial mass production had overcome the perennial problem of scarcity, the authors now identified "underconsumption" as the new challenge for business, citing Henry Ford and other "consumption-minded" business leaders as their key witnesses. Marketing practice had already improved greatly, they acknowledged. Retailers had sped up the distribution chains, making shopping "quick and easy" with modern chain stores, convenient packaging, and advertising, which enticed consumers directly, creating demand for specific goods. Striving for predictability and innovation at the same time, consumer engineering promised a recipe for more scientific marketing and the systematic creation of new consumer demand.
Indeed, mass marketing was not an innovation of the Depression era in the United States. Product innovation and new packaging forms, historians Gary Cross and Robert Proctor have recently argued, shaped consumer behavior beginning in the late 1800s; "packaged pleasures" such as cigarettes, candy bars, or phonograph records were engineered to entice new consumption habits. American industry, furthermore, was never as focused on standardized mass production as traditional narratives of Fordism have suggested. Instead, business historians have demonstrated that the "Second Industrial Revolution" saw many producers and entire branches of the consumer goods industries oriented toward production in smaller batches, which produced an endless stream of novel designs. Craftsmen and designers in ceramics, furniture, and other household goods were intimately attuned to shifting popular tastes, and experienced experts in the employ of manufacturers and retailers "imagined consumers" and their desires. The advocates of consumer engineering hoped to put such practices on a more scientific footing and to apply them across the economy more generally.
With the turn of the twentieth century, mass marketing found new forms and professional expressions in sales, manufacturing, and retailing. Consumer goods producers increasingly relied on recognizable brands and sophisticated distribution networks, which established a more direct link between manufacturer and consumer. Catalogues such as Sears made the new wealth of goods available to a truly national audience. Retailing also became more elaborate and differentiated in its appeals to consumers. Large department stores served as "palaces of consumption" with lavish displays and elaborate shop windows that sparked the consumer imagination. The world of goods they presented aimed to entice desire among an expanding buying public. Retail historians have recently emphasized the role of independent shops and of the more mundane grocery trade in "modernizing" consumer goods distribution in the United States. By the 1920s, American industry could rely on an efficient distribution machinery to market its wares.
Retailers and manufacturers increasingly harnessed mass media magazines such as the Lady's Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post to shape consumer expectations and new social standards of consumption. While it was still out of reach for many, including most African Americans and those living in rural poverty, American households aspired to a middle-class "standard of living" which was reflected in home furnishings and proper dinnerware as much as in up-to-date equipment for kitchens and bathrooms. Professional advertising agencies were at the forefront of selling this American consumer modernity. Advertisements had long provided much more than product information, but instead sold notions of progress and offered consumers cues to proper behavior in a quickly changing world. Around the turn of the century, some advertising experts even developed early systematic forms of "hard sell" and "soft sell" approaches, relying on market research and information or on aesthetic and psychological appeals respectively.
Advertisers pursued their business in an increasingly strategic and professional manner as agencies became nationwide and, particularly after World War I, even global entities. Advertising trade journals such as Printer's Ink led the way in a movement toward more professional forms of selling, heeding the call for new forms of "scientific marketing" to complement Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" in production for the realm of distribution. From retailing and door-to-door salesmanship to the marketing of national brands such as Ford and Coca-Cola, the first decades of the century witnessed the emergence of professional salesmen and marketing experts and the early development of "scientific selling." Even prior to the Great Depression, then, most major corporations in the United States had recognized the importance of mass marketing. Instead of a single-minded focus on production, they began to develop brands and considered their corporate image as it related to consumers and the broader public. The crisis of the Depression made consumer-oriented marketing ever more critical in competitive industries. Both manufacturers and retailers invested even more than before in marketing strategies aimed at anticipating and creating consumer demand.
What, then, was new about the call for consumer engineering at the beginning of the 1930s? The boom of the 1920s had laid a solid foundation for their ideas, Sheldon and Arens acknowledged, yet they planned to go further: "If the depression put a temporary stop to the consumer gold rush, it ushered in the more systematic mining of the engineer. Today wise executives are laying their shafts for the richer ores that are not so obviously on the surface." On one level, the marketing program the authors prescribed simply made explicit those trends in marketing practice which had been gathering steam over the course of the previous decades. This would entail the creation of specialized marketing departments and of a more fully developed marketing profession over the coming decades. A growing number of companies began to move toward a strategy of "marketing management" that employed new forms of "merchandising," i.e., the conscious planning of product innovations for the consumer market.
On a second, more fundamental level, the engineering mindset and the emphasis on scientific methodology characterized a new generation of consumer experts who presented themselves as having a more thorough grasp of consumer markets and their psychology and a new, proactive attitude. New experts in "humaneering," Sheldon and Arens admonished in 1932, needed to tackle "the much deeper and subtler problems [of] the sociologist and the psychologist." Such an approach required detailed analysis, but it also raised the possibility of conscious manipulation. Consumer engineering, the authors noted, was the "science of finding customers, and it involves the making of customers when the findings are slim." In either case, specialized market research would be crucial for this endeavor as it allowed for forecasting market developments and consumer tastes. Of the new experts, this required a degree of scientific understanding combined with a great deal of creative intuition. The modern marketer or ideal "consumer engineer," according to Sheldon and Arens, had to be "mechanically minded and inventive, but above all he must be an artist with a lively imagination." This opened the door to both academics and artists to play a much greater role within professional marketing over the coming decades.
Embedded within this combination of the technocrat and the artist, furthermore, we find a tension between the marketer as a sober analyst and as a creative visionary. Efforts to make marketing more systematic and scientific were accompanied by consumer engineering's other central tenet, its emphasis on aesthetics and style. The more competitive the market, the greater the need for distinguishing products through design. Recurring style innovations fostered consumer demand and added a broader sense of cultural dynamism and modernity to American products. In order to keep up with the times, Consumer Engineering suggested, U.S. companies would do well to embrace the modernist forms of avant-garde art of the interwar era. In this, the authors notably turned to Europe for inspiration.
Beauty in Industry: American Perceptions of European Consumer Modernity
When it came to design (especially with regard to high-priced luxury goods), American marketing experts during the early 1930s felt as though they could still learn from Europe. Art promotes business, Sheldon and Arens proclaimed, and, in their view, the inspiration for the true artist remained in Europe. Here, they felt, both modernity in design and the concept of fashion change appeared to be most developed, as for example in the market for women's clothing, which was still squarely dominated by Paris, where Sheldon himself had lived for a while. While Sheldon and Arens scorned the elitism of European industrial design as incompatible with the demands of the machine age, they still saw enormous potential in European modernism for American industry. Interested in design for machine and mass production, they highlighted German immigrant Kem Weber's innovative bent-lock furniture designs for mass production as one example of industrial styling from a "new type of artist" who combined modernist aesthetics with the demands of mass marketing.
The use of design and artwork in marketing was, of course, not entirely new at the beginning of the 1930s. In fact, Earnest Elmo Calkins had been among the first to emphasize the importance of product design for sales as early as the 1910s, and his Chicago-based advertising agency Calkins & Holden had pioneered the use of modernist imagery and graphics in advertising. By World War I, graphic design was widely recognized as an effective sales tool. During the late 1920s, however, aesthetics attracted additional attention in U.S. business culture amidst a growing sentiment (especially among East Coast elites) that American product design needed to catch up with modernist trends across the Atlantic. The 1925 Paris Exposition of industrial goods was widely seen as a wake-up call to American design experts. New York Times commentator Miriam Beard observed that European countries not only led the United States in style and design but also translated this into an advantage in trade and industry. Americans by contrast were "giants of efficiency" but lacked taste, ideas, and proper industrial arts schools. European industry and governments, contemporary observers warned, had realized that style and design were "an economic resource."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Consumer Engineers and the Transnational Origins of Consumer Capitalism Consumer Engineers as New Marketing ExpertsTransatlantic Transfers and Transnational Dimensions of Consumer Capitalism
Midcentury Marketing as Social Engineering
1 The Origins of “Consumer Engineering”: Interwar Consumer Capitalism in Transatlantic Perspective The Emergence of Mass Marketing in the United States
American Perceptions of European Consumer Modernity
The Reciprocity of Transatlantic Consumer Transfers
Social Engineering between European Reform Movements and 1930s America
Section One Transformations in Marketing and Consumer Research The Rise of Consumer Engineering: American Marketing at Midcentury (1930s–1960s)
2 The Art of Asking Why: The “Vienna School” of Market Research and Transfers in Consumer Psychology Toward a Professionalization of Marketing Research in the United States
Interwar Vienna and the Study of Modern Consumer Markets
Paul Lazarsfeld’s Transatlantic Career in Market Research
The BASR and the “Vienna School” in Postwar American Marketing Research
Social Scientists as Consumer Engineers
3 From Mass Persuasion to Engineered Consent: The Impact of “European” Psychology on the Cognitive Turn in Marketing Thought New Approaches to Survey Psychology and Consumer Motivations
Wartime Research and New Perspectives on Mass Communication
Kurt Lewin and the Impact of Experimental Psychology
George Katona and the Advent of Behavioral Economics
Consumer Psychology and Social Engineering in Wartime and Cold War
4 Hidden Persuaders? Market Researchers as “Knowledge Entrepreneurs” between Business and the Social Sciences The Expansion of Market Research in American Industry, 1930s–1950s
The Drive for “Scientific” Marketing Research: Alfred Politz Research Inc.
Ernest Dichter’s Institute for “Motivation Research”
Image and Brand: Market Research as Creative Consumer Engineering
Consumer Engineering and the Limits of Hidden Persuasion
Section Two Designing for Sustained Demand
“Tastemakers” or “Wastemakers”? Commercial Design at Midcentury (1930–1960)
5 The Designer as Marketing Expert: European Immigrants and the Professionalization of Industrial and Graphic Design in the United States Industrial Designers as Consumer Engineers
European Immigrants and American Commercial Design
Raymond Loewy, French-Born Star of “American” Industrial Design
A “New Type of Artist” in Graphic and Advertising Arts
“Good Design” and the Aestheticization of American Consumer Capitalism
New Experts for America’s Midcentury World of Goods
6 The Commercialization of Social Engineering? Adapting Radical Design Reform to American Mass Marketing Ferdinand Kramer: From Standardizing Working Class Homes to Marketing Novelties
Radical Modernism and Commercial Applications of Social Engineering
The American Bauhaus: Between Experiment in Totality and Design for Industry
Moholy-Nagy’s Struggles with Corporate America
Business Ties of the Institute of Design
The American Legacy of European Design Reform
7 “Streamlining Everything”: Design, Market Research, and the Postwar “American” World of Goods Consumer Research at Raymond Loewy Associates
The Psychology of Packaging in the Supermarket Era: Walter Landor Associates
Brand Images and Corporate Identities
Section Three Transatlantic Return Voyages
Bridging Transatlantic Divides: Bringing Consumer Modernity “Back” to Europe
8 Corporate America and the International Style: The Transnational Network of Knoll Associates between Europe and the United States Knoll Associates in the United States
The Use of Emigré Networks
Marketing Interior Design as Corporate PR
Exporting “American” Design as “International” Style
9 The “Return” to Europe: Emigrés as Cultural Translators and the Transformation of Postwar European Marketing (R)emigrés as Transatlantic Mediators
Consumer Research in Postwar Europe
Ernest Dichter as Transatlantic Mediator
Commercial Design as a Transatlantic Transfer
“Good Design” as Cold War Cultural Policy
Consumer Engineering: Challenges and Legacies
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Archival Sources
Notes
Index