Journal ArticleDOI
The Therapy of Consumption Motivation Research and the New Italian Housewife, 1958-62
TLDR
The transformation of the image of the housewife-consumer in Italian advertising during the 'economic miracle' of the late 1950s and early 1960s is described in this article, which argues that motivation research -an originally American market research technique with Freudian origins -was crucial in altering the ways in which advertisers and marketers related to women consumers.Abstract:
This article describes the transformation of the image of the housewife-consumer in Italian advertising during the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing on market research, professional debates and advertising campaigns it argues that motivation research - an originally American market research technique with Freudian origins - was crucial in altering the ways in which advertisers and marketers related to women consumers. Motivation research made advertisers and marketers conceive of consumers as endowed with an intrinsic desire for self realization. The qualitative methodology that it introduced also allowed the marketing profession to observe and absorb the new ways of life that were proposed by the counterculture and the women’s liberation movements of the early 1960s. Towards the early 1970s these elements blended into a distinctly ‘emancipated’ advertising discourse, a ‘commodity feminism’ where women consumers were encouraged to use consumer goods to mark off an autonomous, i...read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Sustainability of “Sustainable Consumption”:
TL;DR: The authors examines the limitations of the concept of sustainable consumption in terms of the inadequate attention given to the social, cultural, and historical contextualization of consumption, and argues that macromarketing should adopt modes of inquiry that fully engage with this contextualization.
Journal Article
Making space for capital: The production of global landscapes in contemporary India
TL;DR: Agha et al. as mentioned in this paper examined the ways in which real estate industry members use representations of a prosperous globally integrated Indian future to fuel the expansion of global finance capital into Indian real estate.
Journal ArticleDOI
Constructing prestige and elaborating the 'professional': Elite residential complexes in the National Capital Region, India
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the production of the internationally familiar landscapes of gated high-rise housing, malls and information technology campuses that have been constructed in the National Capi...
Journal ArticleDOI
From Counterculture to Consumer Culture: Vespa and the Italian youth market, 1958–78
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a case study of Piaggio's marketing strategies for their motor scooters during the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that countercultural attachments were mobilized and made part of advertising discourse first when they harmonized with visions for a future post-materialistic consumer society harboured by advertising professionals.
References
More filters
Book
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
TL;DR: Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style as discussed by the authors is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials:
TL;DR: The metaphor of machine as text is explored, set within the context of longstanding problems in social theory about agency and object, where 'configuring' includes defining the identity of putative users, and setting constraints upon their likely future actions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Making up People: On Some Looping Effects of the Human Kind - Institutional Reflexivity or Social Control?
TL;DR: In this paper, an account of the co-construction of categorical identity and personal identity among human beings is presented, where people recognize themselves within a socially sanctioned categorical scheme, and hence institutional and personal reflexivity occur as a joint movement that, at the same time, can be seen as an exercise in social control.
MonographDOI
Advertising the American Dream: Making way for Modernity 1920–1940
TL;DR: Advertising the American Dream as mentioned in this paper explores the two decades when advertising discovered striking new ways to play on our anxieties and to promise solace for the masses, as American society became more urban, more complex, and more dominated by massive bureaucracies, the old American Dream seemed threatened.