Consumer Engineering — the origins of buying more than we need
Humans have always used and used up stuff. To fill their bellies, cover their bodies and put a roof above their heads. Throwing away or consuming more than necessary was taboo for most of human history. Thriftiness and frugality were the virtues of prosperity for many millennia. The more you saved the more you had.
Fast forward to the 21th century and everything is the opposite. “Prosperity lies in spending.” (1) The more you spend the more you contribute to economic growth which leads to prosperity. Frugality and thriftiness have disappeared without a trace and ever bigger homes crammed with stuff we never use have become the standard measure of success. Prosperity equals growth, even if that growth, the continuous acquisition of stuff, is the reason for anxiety, social detachment and depression.
How did we get here? How have hundreds of years of frugality got replaced by manic excitement for new stuff in a few short decades?
It all started in the US. Around the turn of the 20th century, the economy grew four times faster than the population thanks to the industrial revolution and a relatively peaceful period. (2) By the 1920’s there were more products on the market than people could or would buy.
“The textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear… “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”
— James J. Davis, Secretary of Labor, 1927 cited from Nation’s Business magazine (3)
The leaders of the economy found themselves in this unfamiliar situation of overproduction. Or, as they saw it, underconsumption. To find a solution to this imbalance, the leaders had to choose between two options:
- Slow down production to match the demand by reducing working hours.
- Increase consumption to fuel economic growth by motivating people to buy more.
We live in a world built on this crucial decision. By the staggering amount of persuasive advertising and the million tools making it ever easier to consume, it is not difficult to deduct which direction they decided to take. It was option 2): molding the ordinary person into a consumer to feed the momentum of capitalism.
“We have learned that prosperity lies in spending not in saving. […] The increased profits comes from increased production made possible by increased consumption.”
— Earnest Elmo Calkins, 1932 (1)
The leaders faced a difficult challenge though. They had to find a way to erase frugality and thriftiness from the value system of the masses and replace it with spending and throw away culture. It was no easy or quick transformation, but thanks to the collaborative efforts of contemporary intellectuals, industrialists and politicians, it was a success.
Edward Cowdrick, an economist and management advisor talked about “the new economic gospel of consumption”, in which workers must be educated in the new “skills of consumption”. (4)
Earnest Elmo Calkins, an acknowledged advertising executive, coined the term consumer engineering to describe the necessary tools and processes for this invaluable ‘education’.
“Goods fall into two classes, those we use, such as motor-cars or safety razors, and those we use up, such as toothpaste or soda biscuit. Consumer engineering must see to it that we must use up the kind of goods that we now merely use. Would any change in the goods or in the habits of people speed up their consumption? Can they be displaced by new models? Can artificial obsolescence be created? Consumer engineering does not end until we can consume all we can make”
— Earnest Elmo Calkins, 1932 (1)
It was the large-scale, systematic application of the four fundamental practices of consumer engineering that led to the successful transformation into consumer society.
- Planned obsolescence
- Perceived obsolescence
- Advertising and PR
- Consumer credit
1) Planned obsolescence
Industry leaders realized that selling high-quality, long-lasting goods is almost like digging their own graves. As people filled up their homes with stuff that lasted for decades, the demand for new stuff shrank. This was bad news for business since continuous economic growth is only possible if sales keeps growing year by year.
Planned obsolescence came to rescue. The idea is simple: intentionally shortening the lifespan of a product by smart engineering to ‘motivate’ people to buy more often.
But if your product breaks earlier, customers are obviously going to turn to a competitor for a longer-lasting product. How do you compete in this market? You make a pact with the competition to produce equally sucky stuff.
The Phoebus cartel is a well-known example. Before the cartel came alive, a light bulb had 2000 hours long life. As the market was saturating, major manufacturers like GE, Osram and Phillips agreed to decrease the life of a light bulb to 1000 hours. Making products worse was an equally demanding engineering task as improving them, so all companies devoted substantial efforts to reduce the life-span with just the right amount. The agreement prescribed fees for companies producing longer lasting bulbs. The more hours the lightbulb exceeded the agreed 1000 hours the higher the fee was. (5)
2) Perceived obsolescence
Even if stuff broke faster, there was an observable limit of how much people wanted to consume. Not enough to keep the wheel of capitalism rolling toward the never ending economic growth. Remember, the memories of thriftiness and frugality still lingers at this time, and people are not used to buying things for the sake of…buying. To overcome this problem, the leaders of the economy needed to invent other reasons for people to consume.
Enters perceived obsolescence. In case of perceived obsolescence the product can be in a perfect condition, but made to feel obsolete by newer, shinier versions. The old model is outdated, does not follow the current trends, and thus ruins the image of the owners. To be seen as “modern” or “fashionable” the newest version is necessary.
“We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
— Paul Mazur, a partner at Lehman Brothers, (10)
Henry Ford’s is an illustrative example of this shift. In 1922 he said “We want a man who buys one of our cars never to have to buy another one” and that “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” Charles Kettering, the Head of Research at General Motors on the other hand perfectly understood the importance and mechanism of perceived obsolescence. In 1929 he advocated for “Keeping the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He didn’t mean producing subpar automobiles, rather offering different colors and designs every year to evoke dissatisfaction and spark desire for the new.
These two opposing approaches to product and marketing resulted in GM outperforming Ford in the 1920’s. The end of the story? Henry Ford started producing different styles and colors every year from 1933. (6)
3) Advertising and PR
Artificially induced desire is a key cog in the machine of consumerism. While perceived obsolescence was focused on making people buy the new version of an old product, people also needed to be ‘educated’ to buy more stuff. Stuff they never knew they wanted.
Advertising was used to constantly expose people to the stuff they could have and the stuff the Joneses already had. The pervasive messaging of “more is better” and “what you have is not enough” was effective and eventually most of the US jumped on the consumerism bandwagon.
PR on the other hand was much more subtle. With product placement and celebrity endorsement the target was not even aware that he/she had been influenced. Edward Bernays, the father of PR, learned the craft of psychology from his uncle Freud. He had the necessary psychological insight into how to manipulate the subconscious. He argued that business “cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda… to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.”
Beside the business implication, Bernays clearly saw the influence of advertising and PR on political power. In his book Propaganda, he explains:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country […] Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that […] we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world”
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928 (7)
In other words: whoever can manipulate the masses the most with the help of advertising and PR has the most power.
And who else knows better how to manipulate the masses than people working with advertising and PR? Galbraith, a leading proponent of American liberalism, highlighted in 1958 that:
“Goods are plentiful. Demand for them must be elaborately contrived. Those who create wants rank amongst our most talented and highly paid citizens. Want creation — advertising — is a 10 billion dollar industry.”
Understanding the importance of advertising and PR in continuous economic growth the political climate was supportive. President Herbert Hoover acknowledged the valuable work of men and women in advertising saying:
“You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.”
Advertising and PR had become ubiquitous in consumer culture, giving the power to companies and brands to ‘pull the wires’ and ‘guide the world’.
4) Consumer credit
Before the 20th century, there was little need for credit. Borrowing to buy more than you needed was frowned upon, even disapproved. After all, frugality and thriftiness were the measures of prosperity.
In the 1920’s the tides turned and as people began to learn that “more is better” and “spend more to have more”, the need for consumer credit increased. Companies started offering installment plans and credit to their own customers (2) (4), not because of some fairy altruistic reason, but simply to sell more. At the end of the decade, debt was a mind boggling 200 percent of the GDP of the time. No surprise that the system collapsed suddenly and catastrophically, turning into the Great Depression. After WWII consumerism soared again and the first universal credit card was issued in the 1950’s (4). Visa and MasterCard appeared in the late 1970’s that changed our relationship to spending forever. (8) The sky became the limit of what people could buy with the money they didn’t have. There was always something new to desire, and since consumer credit was sitting in everybody’s pocket, going over budget to buy excess stuff did not require a second thought.
“In the 1980s the nature of the consumer culture changed from being one in which people aspired to something 10–15% more than what they had to being a time when people started aspiring to be rich.”
— Juliet Schor, economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College (9)
If it hadn’t been clear before, now it must be: our current consumer culture was purposefully engineered. We were “educated” and “trained” to be consumers, to see shopping as a solution to many of our problems.
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
— Victor Lebow, 1955 (4)
Although consumerism got hold in the US first, it soon took over most of the world and dominates the western value system to this day.
As consumers, the first step toward ending our toxic relationship with excessive consumption is realizing the presence and impact of these four practices. Understanding how we are ‘engineered’ and ‘trained’ to consume more than we need hopefully will lead to saying “No!” to tempting offers much easier.
Resources
(1) Calkins E. E., (1932), Whan Consumer engineering really is.
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/course/Design&Society/fall/Readings/IDRErnestCalkins.pdf
(2) Consumerism: an Historical Perspective, Pacific Ecologist, (2004) http://www.pacificecologist.org/archive/consumerhistory.html#f21
(3) In quotes: The origins of consumerism and the work ethic, Useful Ideas Project, (2013)
https://www.usefulideasproject.com/why-am-i-so-tired-origins-consumerism-work-ethic/
(4) Higgs, K., (2021) A Brief History of Consumer Culture, MIT Reader https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/
(5) The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
(6) Wallman, J. (2013). Stuffocation: How we’ve had enough of stuff and why you need experience more than ever. Crux Publishing
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18865910-stuffocation
(7) Bernays, E. (1928), Propaganda
http://www.whale.to/b/bernays.pdf
(8) Credit Card, https://www.britannica.com/topic/credit-card
(9) The Men Who Made Us Spend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBvsvt_xCLA
(10) Paul Mazur quote
https://www.businessinsider.com/birth-of-consumer-culture-2013-2?r=US&IR=T
