Massez consumption in America

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New market research techniques, introduced in the 1920s, showed that women controlled purchasing decisions for about 80% and were the main agents of consumption. Products for the home, cosmetics and women's clothing were very present in advertisements, but women were also targeted for many items such as clothing or toiletries. In the late 1920s, to increase sales, car companies General Motors and Ford strengthened their marketing strategy towards women, emphasizing style, beauty and color. Advertisers portrayed men as producers and women as consumers, a representation that associated purchasing with the feminine and supposedly feminine characteristics such as emotionality, impulsiveness, and irrationality (Hill, 2002).

Even though advertising techniques changed, its fundamental relationship with mass consumption persisted. American advertisers, businessmen and trade unionists generally argued in favor of high levels of consumption, an element necessary for prosperity and social cohesion. Attracting beyond ethnic, gender and class divisions, they embraced the American way of "wealth / property democracy" that could help many people, regardless of their true income, feel that they belong To the "middle class" and "free".

Reviews in the US

Even if businessmen, politicians, and the majority of the American population (who enjoyed an increasingly high standard of living in the twentieth century) generally celebrated mass consumption, critical voices heard a note Discordant and darker in this new order. A series of movements emerged that sought, for example, governmental regulation to moderate the negative effects of consumption. The regulation of the consumption of drugs, alcohol, gambling or betting, it was explained, could prevent self-destructive behavior. In addition, new consumer advocacy groups, while using the same concept of citizen-consumer as advertisers, fought to put forward the "rights" of consumers. They claimed greater truth in advertisements and stricter rules regarding product safety. Stuart Chase, in his book The Money's Worth (1927), criticized false advertising and agreed with John Ruskin that consumerism would create waste. In 1929, Chase helped create Consumers ‘Research, an organization devoted to consumer education (Cross) .Other critics, from some of the best social commentators of the time, regained the traditional deplorations so prevalent in the religious and secular life. They expressed various fears about the impact of consumption, fears that came back to the minds of many intellectuals around the world. Thorstein Veblen and his disciples denounced the ostentatious display of consumption and valued manual labor, simplicity and honest labor. Ralph Borsodi, in his book The Ugly Civilization (1929), put forward the idea that industrial production and mass culture threatened the individual, weakened family life, and transformed existence into a permanent quest for money. In his novel, Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis described the emptiness and spiritual poverty that resulted from capitalist slogans. Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922), wondered whether the public trained in a mass media culture would not behave like a "wild herd" and therefore threaten the core values ​​of democracy.

During the years of growth following the Second World War, a virulent critique of advertising, and its corollary of excessive consumption, spread widely. Famous novels and films such as The Hucksters (1947, based on a novel written by Frederic Wakeman) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956, from a novel by Sloan Wilson) featured advertisers as cold men, Manipulators, indifferent to moral and family values, perfectly symptomatic of social and even national dysfunctions. In post-war slang, selling out was not a successful sales effort, but a loss of moral principles of integrity to satisfy material needs. Currents of art, science fiction and popular psychology of the 1950s produced identical visions in which a materialistic and manipulated people sank into a spiritual desert. The consumer rights movement, which Ralph Nader and others revived in the 1960s, was built on a popular and enduring mistrust against those journalist Vance Packard had brilliantly taunted in The Hidden Persuaders (1957) (Fox).

Anti-consumer activists from all regions and social strata did not have a united position. But they expressed points of view that converged on a shared warning: consumer goods could promise plenitude, pleasure and shared entertainment, but ultimately they would lead to the isolation of the individual and the disintegration of society. These criticisms, of course, resembled those that often came up against US consumer goods around the world. Many American critics have participated in transnational networks of social criticism. Exiles in America, close to the Frankfurt school, for example, had a great deal of influence among the post-war intellectuals. Outside the United States, however, such criticisms of the consumer society were most often referred to as "anti-American."

The American model of mass consumption took shape in the historical circumstances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It developed with increasingly sophisticated tools to stimulate markets, including advertising. It also allowed a very diverse nation to forge links through a "material nationalism" based on the mass consumption community. However, this world-wide system remained rooted in its American origins, based on cheap resources and relatively inadequate workforce. During the Cold War in particular, American companies and ruling elites boasted of the capacity of the consumerist system and of publicity to stimulate demand and to revitalize the industrial fabric and the world of employment, leading to a standard of living Higher for citizens and workers all over the world. But today, such a universal productivity vision appears definitively incompatible with the twenty-first century and its environmental stakes.

References

Chambers, J. (2008). Madison Avenue and the Color Line : African Americans in the Advertising Industry. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1-57.

Cross, G. (n.d.). An All-Consuming Century. 111-116.

Fox, %. (n.d.). The Mirror Makers. 201-210.

Hill, D. D. (2002). Advertising to the American Woman. Ohio State University Press.

Lamoreaux, N. (1985). Harvard University Press. The Great Merger Movement in American Business.

Leach,