Book Review: Capitalism and the Senses by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman

My work in marketing and consumption history draws heavily from visual sources. To expand my sensory and historical repertoire, I decided to read and review Capitalism and the Senses edited by business historians Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman. This new book consists of an introduction and twelve chapters written by ten historians, one anthropologist, and a geographer. Each of the chapters is single-authored, quite in contrast to the multiple-authored writing typical in marketing and many other fields. As the old joke goes, readers will have no doubt about which author is the guilty party. Seriously, though, these are well-researched and very thought provoking essays. Capitalism and the Senses emerged from a June 2017 workshop under the same title held at Harvard Business School and from a November 2020 online conference, again with the same name, sponsored by the Hagley Museum and Library. The latter institution, occupying the site of the 1802 gunpowder works founded by E.I. du Pont on the banks of Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware, specializes in the material culture of business and technology in America.

Before delving into the contents, the book's cover merits a bit of explanation. It features a “brain plan” illustration (Figure 1) taken from the Book of Life; or, Spiritual, Social, and Physical Constitution of Man written by Dr. Alesha Sivartha, the pen-name of a Kansas doctor named Arthur E. Merton. Copyrighted in 1884 and published in London in 1898, this enigmatic (to put it mildly) work combined pseudoscience and spiritual teaching. The Book of Life is remembered primarily for its ornate diagrams, reproductions of which can be purchased on Etsy and other websites. The cover of Capitalism and the Senses utilizes “Brain and Body” or “Convolutions of the left side,” which identifies areas ostensibly tied to the senses and emotions. Visually compelling covers like this one convey a book's main concept and make a good first impressions to help drive sales. Sadly, academic publishers sometimes insist on inflicting the same, unattractive boilerplate covers upon different titles in series they sponsor. Such poor marketing does a disservice to their authors who have worked so hard.

Figure 1.

Cover of Capitalism and the Senses. Designed by Brad Foltz.

Capitalism and the Senses covers topics in business, marketing, and consumption history mainly in twentieth century America, but also with chapters on the smellscape of Edwardian London and the soundscape of Cold War Eastern Europe. Some of these essays have a theoretical vibe, but most focus on temporal and contextual narratives. They draw from a variety of primary sources including newspapers, trade publications, research reports, vintage (pre-1940) journal articles, material artifacts, and personal interviews. Since the co-editors provide a good chapter-by-chapter summary in their introduction, this review will introduce just a few of the contributions that should be of special interest to marketing historians and to macromarketers more generally. My apologies to the authors whose names go unmentioned.

The Taste of Whiskey

In her essay on whiskey marketing in the mid-twentieth century, Lisa Jacobson examines dozens of studies conducted for distillers by Ernest Dichter and his Institute for Motivational Research (IMR) founded in 1946. The reputation of whiskey had suffered during World War II when a shortage of aged spirits led to the creation of blended whiskeys comprised of grain alcohol (75 to 85 percent) with some of the real stuff added for flavor. Drinking this harsh booze produced notorious hangovers and for years afterwards consumers (i.e., the white males IMR interviewed) commingled taste and after-effects in their assessments of whiskey. Dichter has been known for applying Freudian theory to studies of food, beverages, and tobacco, but IMR also drew from sociology when advising on marketing campaigns for cars and clothing. The latter products were status goods more likely to be consumed publicly.

Dichter's approach to researching the whiskey market of the 1950s resembles the qualitative methodology so prevalent in consumer culture theory today. At the time, IMR departed from mainstream marketing and consumer research that favored quantitative survey research. Qualitative studies based on long interviews were not seriously embraced until the 1980s. However, Dichter differed from later qualitative analysts in that he appears to have been less willing to take what a respondent said at face value. For example, he stuck to his early conclusion that the reasons offered “for preferring certain whiskey brands were really rationalizations that masked deeper emotional needs and status anxieties” (p. 88). He also believed that when his interviewees associated quality whiskey with taste, smoothness, and an absence of after-effects, they “were simply echoing oft-repeated advertising claims” (p. 77). Researchers today should exercise caution interpreting the verbatims they share and consider both the proximate and broader contexts influencing informant statements.

The Sound of Supersonics

David Suisman's chapter, “Sky's the Limit,” provides a good account of the eventual failure to implement supersonic transport (SST) aviation in the United States. Like the race to the moon, Cold War imperatives and nationalism fueled the launch of the SST industrial policy program of the 1960s. However, the prospect of highly intrusive and widespread sonic booms, fears about polluting the upper atmosphere, and a growing distrust of government created a political backlash that ultimately led Congress, by a narrow margin, to cancel funding for the program in 1971. Perhaps Americans were already creating enough noise pollution with their internal combustion engines loudly powering automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, boats, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and more. Concerns over noise pollution and its impact upon human and animal health had been mounting at the time.

This chapter got me thinking about the marketing, consumption, and societal consequences of loud motor noise in the United States. Like Proust's madeleine moment, a few sounds from my past came to mind. Growing up in a lakeside house about fifty miles north of Chicago, the clamor of boat motors was normal in summer, especially on weekends, and sometimes well after dark when a solitary engine almost sounded forlorn. Particularly memorable were the deafening roars of vintage Chris-Craft inboards that literally shook our window panes as they tore across Petite Lake. Illinois winters ushered in blissful outdoor silence, that is until the appearance of earsplitting snowmobiles in the 1960s. Today, living in Southern California, we often can hear high-pitched motorcycles and other unbridled vehicles on the freeway a mile away even when the windows are closed.

One might ask why companies and their consumers have felt entitled to inflict machine noise on so many people and, despite federal regulations, local ordinances, and some law enforcement, why American society has tolerated this behavior. There seems to be a gender component (maleness) in making loud sounds and David Ogilvy's famous headline from 1959—“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”—suggests a possibly upmarket preference for quietness. Sonically speaking, the transition to electric vehicles and garden tools may restore some peace and quiet, but this very attribute may meet resistance from aficionados of loud consumptions. Macromarketing researchers should probe further into these social tensions and their gender, class, and political correlates. Noise pollution can affect human health and wildlife habitats.

The Smell of Shopping

In her chapter, Jessica P. Clark writes about the “All British Shopping Week” held in January 1911 and how Harrods transformed its perfumery department into “The Salon of Fragrance and Fair Women.” Two months later, in a promotional tour de force, fifty glamorous actresses played the role of shop girls spritzing customers and signing autographs. Proceeds went to charities. Clark uses this event as a springboard for a broader discussion of the London smellscape of the day and how the olfactory competed with visuality in Edwardian commerce. The idea of “modernity” often has been conflated with new visual regimes, an ocularcentric phenomenon as Clark puts it, but other sensory experiences also contributed to its evolution.

The smell of the past has engrossed a number of historians, as well as the publishers of scratch-and-sniff children's books and museum curators intent on sharing pungent experiences with visitors. The historiography of smell has investigated both their physical occurrences and how societies have perceived them (Jenner 2011). The materialist tradition has emphasized foul odors in pre-modern and industrializing societies, and has recounted public health efforts to eliminate stench, but work remains to address the entirety of old smellscapes. Smell mentalities and cultural meanings have changed over time (Tullett 2019). Before the acceptance of germ theory in the latter nineteenth century, people believed in miasma theory where disease transmission was said to result from bad air. Sixty years ago, when smoking was very common, the smell of cigarettes in public spaces probably would have been less of an issue than it would be at present when critical social norms have forced the diminishing number of smokers to puff in isolation.

A great deal of marketing past and present has championed the aromas of some products (perfumes, baked goods, dryer sheets, new car interiors), while promoting other goods (soaps, deodorants, hygiene products, air fresheners) to rid the world of objectionable smells. A 1960 Ogilvy tagline for Maxwell House coffee—“It tastes as good as it smells”—is a classic instance of the positive positioning of a scent. Listerine's mouthwash campaign in the 1920s—“Always a bridesmaid—but never a bride”—proposed a brand to combat the devastation caused by bad breath. The advertising of smell creation and removal has played a significant role in the development of consumer culture. This might be a good topic for oral histories where older consumers can be asked about the smells they recall from the past.

The Touch of Textiles

Different American businesses conducted sensory research in the twentieth century, but none of these efforts exceeded the important work by DuPont on synthetic fabrics. In her chapter “Sold on Softness,” Regina Blaszczyk even contends “that DuPont was the Apple of midcentury America and that the fiber industry was its Silicon Valley” (p. 206). In 1920, DuPont had begun expanding its product line beyond gunpowder and explosives to include man-made fibers, plastics, paints, and dyes. DuPont became an important manufacturer of rayon, a type of artificial silk. In the mid-1920s the company scrutinized consumer surveys conducted by the National Retail Dry Goods Association (NRDGA). Women found woven rayon fabrics coarse looking, too shiny, stiff, and unpleasant to touch. With this input, DuPont chemists and engineers quickly learned to extrude thinner filaments and spin finer yarns that when woven felt smoother to the hand.

In the 1930s, DuPont promoted itself with the famous slogan “Better Things for Better Living … through Chemistry” and funded a Fabric Development Service in New York with offices in the Empire State Building. This location was in the midst of the city's textile district and its wholesale cloth showrooms. Ready-to-wear manufacturers also clustered nearby in the Seventh Avenue garment center and tony retailers lined Fifth Avenue. DuPont staff could assess the pulse of the market on foot, but for further precision, they contracted Paul F. Lazarsfeld from the Psychological Corporation who conducted studies in a laboratory setting on how tactile experiences influenced women's fabric preferences.

In his 1932 book, The Psychology of Pleasantness and Unpleasantness, J. G. Beebe-Center referred to this type of research as “hedonic psychophysics.” Today, marketing scholars studying touch might prefer the term “haptics” or the active seeking and picking up information with the hands. For some consumers, this drive can be increased through exposure to visual stimuli (Peck and Childers 2003). As Peck and Shu (2009) demonstrated experimentally, touching “an object with positive sensory feedback increased perceived ownership, affective reaction, and the valuation of the object” (p. 442). Presumably, informed touching of goods made in the past should yield some insights into how their original makers and users had experienced them. Still, touching artifacts today can only approximate past haptics because contexts differ over time.

Advertising promises of romance through touch should be of interest to gender and society researchers. Linda Scott (2015), for example, has considered the famous Woodbury Soap campaign (“A Skin You Love to Touch”), first introduced in 1911, and whether it sexualized selling, or was simply good marketing on the part of the female copywriters employed by J. Walter Thompson. Fresh studies should address the meanings and implications of touch as an advertising platform used throughout the twentieth century and into the era of the #MeToo movement.

Lessons and Limitations

One of the pleasures in reading this book has been learning new things. For instance, Nicholas Anderman, in his chapter on “Sounding Maritime Metal,” taught me that the word “theory” derives from the Greek term theoria or “to look.” If to theorize means meticulous looking, then my own historical work with visual data is more theoretical than some reviewers have appreciated! Anderman also explains how shipping containers are made from Cor-Ten weathering steel invented by the United States Steel Corporation in the early 1930s. An alloy compounded with copper, chromium, and nickel, Cor-Ten forms a rusty patina that makes it more resistant to the endemic corrosion encountered during maritime shipping.

Despite the prominence of the word “capitalism” in the book's title, readers should not expect too much macro-level, critical analysis of this dominant economic and political system in all its varieties. Chapters mention capitalism in passing—almost as if the authors were dutifully following instructions from the co-editors—before unpacking their learned case studies of sensory market research, product design, and advertising. David Suisman dutifully attributes the demise of America's SST to “what can happen when capitalism and the senses are in tension and cannot be reconciled,” but fails to explain why European capitalism did not similarly hinder the British and French Concorde project. Capitalism is a complicated explanatory variable loaded with ideology and taking many different forms. Perhaps the level of analysis should refocus down a notch to just business or marketing and the senses.

Regarding alternatives to capitalism, Sven Kube's chapter on the “Cold War Sonic Divide” discusses how musicians in East Germany and the Eastern bloc, suffering from a consumer technology deficit under their Soviet imposed regimes, tried to replicate the innovative sounds of Western popular music in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, even communist countries have deployed aesthetics for societal purposes. Fox (2009) and Nguyen (2023) have reported in this journal how the regimes in the Soviet Union and North Vietnam made good use of the poster medium for improving public health and for building wartime morale. It would be surprising if communist marketing systems did not somehow manipulate the senses of taste, sound, smell, and touch in their own ways.

Edited volumes like Capitalism and the Senses can only include so much, but I would have liked more on the methodological challenges encountered in recounting sensory business history. Visual researchers have access to a multitude of old illustrations, photographs, and television commercials. Publisher willing, still pictures can be shared with readers. One can also find sound recordings from the late nineteenth century onwards, feel and manipulate surviving artifacts, and perhaps recreate tastes from old recipes. Anderman's chapter in Capitalism and the Senses provides a link to a four-minute recording of the metallic sounds heard on a container ship at sea (https://soundcloud.com/user-253244136/cendrillon-metal). All in all, however, these other senses are more difficult than pictures to convey directly and ultimately require written descriptions. Finally, the day-to-day smells of the past may be the most elusive to recapture, and perhaps thankfully so. That said, archaeologists have made progress in the realm of olfaction by applying techniques for identifying and reproducing odorant molecules (Huber et al. 2022).

In conclusion, the value of the essays in Capitalism and the Senses lies partly in their informative historical narratives but, more importantly, in their capacity to make readers think in new ways about marketing and consumption, past and present. The commercialization of taste, sound, smell, and touch has had consequences for consumer culture and for society at large. The marketing of the senses, and how these practices intersect with gender, class, and race, or affect human and natural environments, should provide ample opportunities for further macromarketing research.