Imagining Consumers (versus creating consumers)

Regina Lee Blaszczyk's Imagining Consumers is a deft and well constructed portrait through case studiws of several companies in the glass and ceramics industries.  Through these firms, she illustrates the intersections between research and development, marketing, retailers, manufacturers, artists and middle managers, who sought to determine what consumers wanted.  This flow of interaction leads to a discovery of what consumers need or desire, rather than a manipulation of those needs and desires for purely corporate purposes. 

This is in constrast to my reading of Shelley Nickles' article, "'Preserving Women': Refrigerator Design as Social Process in the 1930s."  Nickles decribes a process of imagination not unlike Blaszczyk's in refrigerator design as the views of designers, engineers, advertisers, and consumers (predominantly women) over time altered the style, material, design, and functions.  I am on board with Nickles' proposition that these issues reinforced social norms about the middle class kitchen and that Frigidare used various sources (home economists, imperfect surveys, etc) to imagine what a typical, middle class consumer would purchase.  I got the impression, though, that she felt the design, functions, and style actually created a vision of middle class consumer life.  The evidence she uses (the Lord & Thomas research, truck surveys through neighborhoods, taking Miss Wagner's comment seriously) seems in line with Blaszczyk's research and argument and does not support a more manipulative argument of corporate market creation through manipulation. 

This seems almost akin to the HIST 610 arguments over which came first, the historian or the history.  Here, did the consumers come first, with their needs and desires, or did to the corporation come first to create those needs and desires? 

Comments

[Salvatore DeGennaro]

I think the "which came first" is a great question and like other which came first questions there is no doubt a cycle involved. While corporations may research a given field of demand certainly the popularization of items within that field further builds demand and the "must have" mentality takes hold. With that said, I am sure any given corporation will embrace both studying what consumers want and trying to dictate what consumers want. I suppose one should not be considered more sinister than the other regarding for profit corporations.

[Kyle Riddle]

Or non-profits. The agency I work with is consistently tasked with finding out what clients need in terms of treatment, what types of treatment are the most up-to-date and beneficial to clients, and what are the needs of the community in terms of prevention and treatment (of child abuse). Internal and external forces dictate our direction and progress. Even though as an agency, we, like social workers, are responding to reported cases of abuse in the community, the definitions of what is child abuse, what cases can be accepted by social workers or by therapists through funding or various grants, and what constitutes an appropriate intervention are all under constant revision or investigation. Pondering the question of origin is an interesting exercise, but I know that with our agency the review and possibilities for improvement come from a host of sources, and all are typically relevant if not eventually implemented.