A Consumers' Republic by Lizabeth Cohen

Author:Lizabeth Cohen [Cohen, Lizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55536-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

This ad from the November 1976 issue of Ms. magazine reveals how the women's movement of the 1970s encouraged mainstream advertisers to recognize and target a new feminist market. (Courtesy of Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States)

Whereas social class and gender were marketing categories with histories that stretched back to the early twentieth century, two other kinds of market specialization—by age and by race or ethnicity—required the postwar revolution in market segmentation to flourish. Teenage, child, senior, black, and ethnic became more than labels for visible social groups; they became marketing segments that advertisers determined were well worth catering to.

If any kind of segmentation epitomized the hopes and success of the postwar marketing profession, it was segmenting by age, where stages of life, linked to patterns of purchasing, reshaped the mass market. One typical overview of the life cycle and buying behavior, published in 1966, identified nine categories, stretching from “Bachelor stage” and “Newly married couple” to “Full Nest I through III” (differentiated by children's ages), and culminating in “Empty Nest I and II” (distinguished by whether the head of household was working or retired) and “Solitary survivor,” both “in labor force” and “retired.” Each stage featured unique market behavior, with, for example, the Newly Married and Full Nesters at their peak in consumption of homes and consumer durables, while Empty Nesters shifted priorities to travel, luxuries, and medical care. Complementing this life cycle analysis, moreover, were intensive studies of certain key age markets. A special report in Printers' Ink at the dawn of market segmentation concluded that it was not just a question of marketers suddenly seeing age segments where once they had pictured only a family unit. Rather, whereas “a generation ago … purchases tended to reflect the needs of the family as a whole,” the meteoric rise of discretionary income in the postwar period had given each segment of the family more influence on purchase decisions, “and—to an extent that would have been considered unlikely in 1939—certain members of the family now have personal purchasing power.” Increasingly, the postwar family was becoming a collection of variously aged individuals with discrete consumer desires and capabilities.63

The first age cohort to attract marketers' attention was teenagers. The discovery of this teen market actually preceded the embrace of market segmentation, as promoters began experimenting with the idea in the 1940s, and its success contributed to the appeal of more extensive segmentation a decade or so later. A 1949 issue of Daniel Starch's marketing research newsletter, for example, was devoted to convincing advertisers of what today seems obvious: that greater profits would result from “writ[ing] special copy for magazines with special audiences” like the teenage readers of Seventeen magazine rather than using a standard sales pitch. Although “adolescence” had been labeled since the nineteenth century to signify a developmental stage, and “youth culture” referred to a select group of eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds in the 1920s, it was not until a majority of teens were graduating from high school in the 1940s

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