Marketing Modernity by Adam Arvidsson

Author:Adam Arvidsson [Arvidsson, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781134489893
Google: AeREk6aIdOYC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-12-08T05:18:58+00:00

The New Woman

Such a reassuring, or to use Alberoni’s term, ‘maniacal’ strategy, resulted from a conception of motivation research as a kind of therapeutic practice, which would work to domesticate recalcitrant consumers into a given model of consumption and everyday life more generally. Such a conception of MR was, however, slightly at odds with Dichter’s own view of the matter, at least as it evolved towards the early 1960s. Dichter now began to emphasize the emancipatory possibilities of MR and of mass consumption in general. His defence of MR against charges of manipulation and Big Brotherism (most influentially voiced some years earlier by Vance Packard) was to claim that its role was rather to bring already existing but hitherto repressed desires into the open. In recognizing and bringing into the open people’s real motives, often repressed by the ‘iron cage of rationality’ or the puritanism that governed their public behaviour, MR could help to realize an accepting ‘hedonistic morality’. This would sanction the pursuit of desire and enable consumption to realize its potential as the main purveyor of happiness and creativity in modern society. Motivation research was thus an excellent example of a ‘democratic practical application of the social sciences’. As Dichter put it on another occasion:

If we want to form reliable programmes for future development we must radically alter our moral concepts. Not only will we need a whole range of goods and products to fill up our free time, but we also need a moral absolution that will free us from those feelings of guilt that have been so profoundly rooted in us.33

MR thus offered a way of liberating the individual from the bonds and expectations of society, rather than adapting him or her to them. In his 1964 introduction to an Italian translation of Pierre Martineau’s Motivation in Advertising, Gian-Paolo Fabris, who was to become one of the most important names within Italian market research, argued for the possibility of such a ‘liberatory’ use of motivation research. The technique invited a new way of treating consumers as individuals, or, as ‘pyschological realities in their own right’, rather than as social categories. This turn was crucial, Fabris argued, because, ‘at the present stage of social evolution, the main value of any product is psychological’. Before, it had perhaps been enough just to advertise to give products connotations of modernity that would make them intrinsically desirable. Now, however, such standardized models were breaking up, and consumer tastes were becoming increasingly diversified. Consequently, advertising and marketing had to abandon standardized mass approaches and concentrate on the individual, psychological reality of demand.34

This break-up of a standardized model was particularly evident in the case of women: in public debates, in particular in upmarket women’s magazines like Grazia and Annabella, there was a widespread questioning of the model of the housewife, and an emerging feminist consciousness, if only of the bourgeois, Betty Friedan, variety. Like the article series ‘The Modern Woman on Trial’ (Processo alla donna moderna), written by Brunella Gasparini in Annabella,

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