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HIDDEN PERSUADERS OR MARKET CONSCIOUS FOLLOWERS
Boston University Historian Finds that Successful Companies Follow the Consumer's Lead
(Boston, Mass.) - Are consumers manipulated into buying things they don't want through skillful advertising? Not so, argues Boston University History Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk in her new book Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. To the contrary, her research reveals that historically the leading manufacturers of home goods have devoted considerable effort to learn about their customers' priorities and preferences, basing their design and product decisions on this information.
And the trend continues today, says Blaszczyk, notably among such products as clothing, home fashions, and automobiles - products that express personal taste and are central to creating an individual's identity.
"The Martha Stewart phenomenon is not really new," says Blaszczyk. "Stewart is really tapping into a long tradition, one that has existed for more than a century, of women choosing carefully among consumer products to make a statement of personal identity and style."
Blaszczyk's book is based on extensive research in the records of three leading American companies that emerged in the century between the Civil War and World War II - Homer Laughlin China (the makers of the now-collectible Fiesta dinnerware), Kohler bathroom fixtures, and Pyrex Ovenware.
"Between 1865 and 1945, fashion intermediaries of various stripes - practical men, shopkeepers, salesmen, retail buyers, materials suppliers, art directors, showroom managers, color experts, home economists, advertising experts, and market researchers . . . read the marketplace and cooperated with factory managers to design products for a spectrum of audiences." These firms cast aside elitist notions of good taste to generate the variety demanded by the working and middle-class women who were then emerging as a powerful consumer force - consituting more than 80 percent of the market for mass manufactured consumer goods.
"Historically women acted as rational consumers," says Blaszczyk. "They found ways to resist the dominant culture while helping to reshape the material world. Producers paid attention to women's choices and changed product designs to meet women's expectations. Rather than infantilizing women, consumerism gave them a voice in the cultural realm. They were key actors in the fashion system. That's a politically charged discovery," Blaszczyk notes.
Blaszczyk is professor of history and American studies at Boston University. She was a researcher at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in the Department of Social and Cultural History from 1978 - 1989 where she developed exhibitions of tableware and other cultural artifacts.
Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Review copies are available on request.
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May 11, 2000
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