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What is consumer desire and how is it embodied in early advertising and shopping? This question has taken me from the Industrial Revolution to the Roaring Twenties and from the Great Depression to the Hollywood Studio-system.

The Industrial Revolution is very important to begin with, as consumerism could only arise when there was an offer of industrialised commodities.

By introducing the automatic assembly line and by advertising cars as symbols of wealth and status, Ford and Sloane revolutionized American manufacturing. This takes us to the beginning of what Veblen called conspicuous consumption. In this new era, gangsters were in control of the Roaring Twenties.

The Great Depression had a major effect throughout the world, but it was the fantasy world of the Hollywood Studio System that made the economy alive again. Advertisers found new ways to influence people. We can speak of major fetishisation and alienation as our needs have become wants.

Finally I tell something about the Culture Industry where we are in now.

The core of consumer desire is that consumer desire is the religion of the late twentieth century. It is a new type of society: “A society built upon the thirst for novelty.” (Miles, 1998). The consumer never gets satisfied. “The consumer sublimates the desire for cultural fulfilment to the rewards of buying and owning commodities ”. There is a process of rotation: something gets out of fashion; therefore we want something else, which is in fashion. “Needs” have become “Wants”.

1 Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution took place in England mid 1700 and in the USA in early 1800. Around 1850, a network of waterways, roads, and railroads opened new markets and reduced transportation costs dramatically. Because of the industrial revolution, it cost people less to buy a product than to make it themselves. Therefore consumer demand was increasing. (Sivulka , 1998)

The evolution of early shopping was different in USA and in Britain.

In Britain , railway connections made it possible for women (the pleasure-seekers) to go to London’s West End. This area became a site of mass consumption, a pleasure zone. It did not take a long time for the retailers to realise that “pleasure meant consumption”. In the book “shopping for Pleasure”, Erika Rappaport describes that gender was central to the commercialization of London. Retailers, journalists, jurists and politicians built spaces and activities they hoped would appeal to all, but especially wealthy, ladies. (Rappaport, 1963).

In the USA it was the civil War (1861-1865 ) that was responsible for the change in shopping. With the men gone to war, it was the women with their wartime earnings who shopped in the stores and purchased the goods. Women became consumers and it was them who had the responsibility for choosing what and how much to buy. (Sivulka, 1998)

There was also a change in urban food retailing. First it evolved from city markets to specialty food stores. But in the larger cities a shopper had to visit half a dozen specialty stores to obtain their basic foods. Therefore large retail shops started to arise. The department stores had glossy showrooms and fixed prices. Window-shopping became a new pastime. (Sivulka, 1998)

The shift in urban food retailing had a big influence on credit. In the early days, people shopped in the city markets almost every day and therefore seller and buyer knew each other: Credit was not a problem. Knowing each other was not the case any more when it came to large retail shopping once a week.

As women did the shopping in Britain, there was a fear by husbands and shopkeepers that women could financially ruin them. “The shopping centres created an opportunity for wives to claim authority over their husbands’ money even when no authority existed.” Therefore husbands and shopkeepers had to protect their economic well-being from female consumption. Retailers solved this problem by changing from informal to formal credit mechanisms. (Shopping for pleasure)

But credit brought consumers also considerable benefits. Hire purchase brought a wide range of household goods such as furniture within the reach people who could not previously afford them. (Rise of consumer soc p 41)

The industrial revolution brought a lot of technological advances:

? The invention of photography in 1839.
? The ability to print detailed illustrations, which gave advertisers a new way of showcasing their products.
? Newspapers and magazines broadened circulation and brought news and advertising to millions of people.
? Introduction of the penny paper: newspapers sold a lot of advertising to subsidize the paper’s operation. They reached a new class of reader: the common man.

After the civil war in the USA, manufacturers and advertisers began to exploit people’s desire for fashionable things. Gradually, material goods became visible symbols of personal wealth. This was especially the case for the growing urban class where social mobility became a possibility. In Design culture we name this period in the UK “the Victorian extravagance”. This means: The more furniture, the better!

The advertisers started to change their style from hard selling into soft selling. People already knew the products, so they had to give the brands symbols in order to make the products stand out.

In the 1880’s slogans and jingles started to catch on. Catch phrases turned the consumer goods into household names and this boosted sales. Trademarks started to exist in the 1890’s: simple brand names evolved into symbols and advertising characters (e.g. Michelin Man).

At the end of the 19th century advertisers became aware that it was possible to sell entirely new products. This meant that consumers bought products they did not even know they wanted until advertising showed it to them.

2 Ford and Sloane

In 1913, Ford revolutionized American manufacturing by introducing the automated assembly line . He reduced the assembly time from 12 ½ hours in 1912 to just 1 ½ hours in 1914. Declining production costs allowed Ford to cut prices. He made it possible for average families to afford a car. Ford was definitely a pioneer because it was he who introduced a minimum daily wage, who shortened the workday and who reduced the workweek.

Ford also realized that higher wages allowed workers to buy more products and therefore he introduced “surplus fordism”. By Surplus Fordism, he meant to give higher wages so the workers had more money to spend.

On the one hand Ford was a builder and bulwark of the modern, mechanized nation; on the other he devoted a remarkable amount of effort and expense to sustaining old-fashioned America. This is why, in the end, Alfred Sloane was more successful.

Alfred Sloane was the president of General Motors from 1923 to 1941 . He built his company into the world's largest automaker by adopting new approaches to advertising and marketing. Sloane’s philosophy was: "The primary object of the corporation is to make money, not just to make cars." Sloane was convinced that Americans were willing to pay extra for luxury and prestige. He advertised his cars as symbols of wealth and status, and in 1927 he introduced the yearly model change, to convince motorists to trade in old models for newer ones with flashier styling. To make his cars affordable, he set up the nation's first national consumer credit agency in 1919. If Henry Ford demonstrated the efficacy of mass production, Sloane revealed the importance of merchandising in a modern consumer society.

Suppliers of consumer goods needed to be more resourceful than the suppliers of basic foodstuffs if they were to persuade the consumer to invest in the more expensive products that they had for sale . Therefore furniture shops had low prices and easy terms. Between the two world wars manufacturers introduced deferred payment schemes. After World War I it was the turn of the motor industry to turn its attention to the working-class consumer. It was a new era (Sivulka, 1998) of Enjoy now, pay later. About 60 percent of all furniture and 75 percent of all radios were purchased on credit. In contrast to the Victorian society which was rather economical, the new consumer society emphasized spending and borrowing!

3 Gangsterism

After WOI, there was a general belief that crime was “a defining element of society”.
The gangster became a central figure in American society because he helped Americans master the changing social world. The book “Inventing the public enemy” explains this by saying that people develop cultures in order to make sense of and control the social facts they encounter in their daily lives. In other words, the imagined gangster fits into a series of attempts to come to grips with the new urban society.

It was possible for the gangster to master the “roaring twenties” because at that time, the USA was the most lawless nation on the globe. Bootlegging and racketeering was everywhere. “Prohibition created a fresh tolerance for lawbreaking. Who could look at his bootlegger as a serious offender when he supplied him with his drinks?”

Bootlegging was a multi-billion dollar business and the gangster lived after it . It was easy to recognise him: silk shirt, designer suit, golden watch and a smashing car. All was readily available through easy credit. One of the best-known gangsters was Al Capone. He was the subject of popular books, numerous pulp publications, movies and feature articles in newspapers. The Americans loved him; he was the embodiment of the American Dream.

But the media gangster was an invention and not an accurate reflection of reality. It was a projection about what would sell. And indeed: millions of Americans literally bought what was being sold. In the 1920’s a new flood of consumer goods entered the market. This event opened the new market of mass-consumption. There was a change in how the products were seen. It was not the function of the products that was important, but the image. And it was the gangster who projected this image to the outside world.

Veblen called this conspicuous consumption. (The theory of the leisure class, 1899) It is the need to spend money in a way that “serves the purpose of a favourable invidious comparison with other consumer”. That is to spend money in a way that makes other people feel poor . This is exactly what the media were doing in the 1920’s. The theory behind this is that according to Veblen , we have two sets of conflicting instincts: constructive and destructive. One of the constructive elements is “Idle Curiosity”. Idle Curiosity refers to our ability to imagine and it can be good or bad. E.g.: we can create literature, but we can exploit it using advertising and propaganda.

Originally, prohibition was meant to lower crime. Instead, crime rates were higher than before and crime became organised. It was the repeal of prohibition that finally lowered crime because the gangster was out of work. With the crash on the Wall Street Stock exchange in 1929, he too lost a lot of money.

As mentioned before, advertising changed from hard selling into soft selling. In1908, Freud, Jung and Scott published the book “The psychology of Advertising”. The content of the book justified “the psychology of suggestion” in order for products to leave an impression in the minds of the consumer .

This idea takes a plunge in the 1920’s where advertising campaigns base on “suggestion psychology to the unconscious mind of the consumers”. This is again what Veblen called conspicuous consumption.

During the 1920s, advertising agencies hired psychologists (including John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, and Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew) to design the first campaigns. They invented brand name identification, created memorable slogans, manipulated endorsements by doctors or celebrities, and appealed to consumers' hunger for prestige and status. By 1929, American companies spent $3 billion annually to advertise their products, five times more than in 1914. (Sivulka, 1998).

Dr John B. Watson claimed to have found basic techniques for predicting and manipulating human behaviour (Sivulka, 1998). According to him, advertisers needed to tap into human drives such as love and fear. They should repeatedly associate the given stimulus with their products. This is why advertisers today often incorporate popular songs in commercials to evoke the same response as the songs themselves.

4 Depression and Hollywood Studio System

Such a booming economy like it existed in the American twenties, it could not last forever. While searching on the Internet, I found some interesting notes about the great depression. Michel Aglietta says that the Great Depression was due to the “uneven early development of a regime of intensive accumulation, revolutionizing social productive powers in the US without simultaneously transforming social consumption norms and the real living conditions of the industrial working class.”

During the Great Depression, Hollywood played a valuable psychological role because it was them who kept the moral of the population high. Figures say that even at the depression's depths, 60 to 80 million Americans attended the movies each week.

A year after the Wall Street Crash, film industry thought it was immune to the Depression . But beginning in 1931, Hollywood felt the effects of America’s disabled economy. The recreation and amusement industries started to revive in 1934. The media attributed the turnaround to quality pictures, which were realised by the Legion of Decency’s drive for cleaner pictures in 1934. This new type of film was called the prestige picture: a big-budget film. (E.g. Columbia’s One Night of Love and MGM’s Dinner at eight.)

Stylish outfits made a huge impact on women’s fashions. Clothes were widely copied by the fashion industry on New York’s Seventh Avenue.

Not only did the Hollywood Studio System have a big influence on the fashion industry, it also had a major influence on the making of brand names thanks to tie-ups . Brand names started to appear more and more in motion pictures. The movie “It pays to advertise” was an advertising campaign on itself. And this is the moment in history where brand names start to speak for themselves.

Behind the scenes, something else was going on. Photographers had the prime responsibility to safeguard the image of a star and to create the desired image of the star. This was because the entire production process revolved around stars and because stars constituted some of the biggest investments of a studio. Photo-flattery often meant “the subjugation of realism to personality”. A director of photography from Paramount: “our aim is to show players and settings not merely as they are, but as the audience would like to see them.”

Radio was the only diversion to prosper during the Great Depression (Balio, 1993). Audiences had time to kill. Radio manufacturers had huge inventories, creating a buyers market. By 1934, radio was reaching 60% of all American homes and had become a common habit. The big difference (Sivulka, 1998) in advertising on the radio was that adverts were meant to sell a company name and not a special product. Another difference is that advertising agencies produced shows for the radio where they (of course) could advertise as much as they wanted.

With Hollywood becoming a total box-office success, it turned the world completely upside-down. Not only were there symbols given to the products, these products became fetishised objects and people were totally alienated! (Fetishism is to give object special values, which it does not have).

Simmel and Veblen described consumerism as “an attempt to mark one off as different from others and to express a distinct social identity” . Symbols have become commodities themselves just as much as the use-object.

5 Culture Industry

We now evolved from Mass Consumption to a Culture Industry . Culture has become an industry; our cultural entities have become commodities. Culture is not a matter of offer and demand anymore; our demands now have been manipulated. Culture has become a fetishised object and this fetishisation has become our new ideology. It is not because we want “culture”, we simply need culture in order to compete with others. And this has been made possible because of the interlocking between artistic culture, economy and finance. It is them who have lain down these new aesthetic standards.

As people have all these dependency needs, they have the need to escape from it. As they escape, they, again, tap into the world that is created by the mass media. Mass media only suggests pleasure. It gives the public a form of relaxation, but above all, it wants us, the public, to be uncritical. We have created for ourselves a world of Pseudo-individualization.

Fetishism and alienation are fascinating subjects, but it is scary to know that we are influenced by it all the time.

6 Conclusion

In conclusion I can say that our society has dramatically changed these last 150 years. The Civil War in the USA and London’s West End introduced an era where women went to the shops as pleasure-seekers and where men and manufacturers were afraid of getting bankrupted by them. Gradually, the function of the product became less important than the symbolic meaning of it.

Luxury and prestige became more important with the boost in the car industry. Gangsters introduced a new way of life. Basically, what you owned was more important than who you were. Sloane’s credit agency made people buy even more: People could buy everything they desired.

Advertising changed from hard selling into soft selling. Many techniques were developed to persuade people. Veblen called this conspicuous consumption. Objects were being fetishised and people became totally alienated.

Initially, The Great Depression put a halt to this fast growing consumerism. But the Hollywood Studio System introduced the prestige-movie. Suddenly there was a new revival of consumer goods and consumption. This was the rise of the “Star-dom”.

Now, we managed to create a world where culture has become an industry, thanks to the interlocking between artistic culture, economy and finance. As we try to escape, we tap into the other imaginable world of the Mass Media.

Endnotes:

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2. Cronk. R., (1996) Consumerism and the new Capitalism. [WWW]. Available from: http://www.westland.net. [21/112004].
3. Sivulka J., (1998). Soap, sex and cigarettes. USA:Wadsworth Publishing Company.
4. Rappaport E.D., (2000) Shopping for pleasure. Chichester, West Sussex: Princeton University Press.
5. American Civil War. Time Line. [WWW]. Available from: http://americancivilwar.com/tl/timeline.html. [accessed 15/11/2004]
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