Engineered to Sell (Paperback)

Jan L. Logemann

ISBN 10: 022666015X / ISBN 13: 9780226660158

Published by The University of Chicago Press, 2019

About this Item

Paperback. The mid-twentieth-century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culturemusic, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan L. Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research, and commercial design who transformed capitalism from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the Americanization paradigm. Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods and examines how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the emigres at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. By focusing on the transnational lives of emigre consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the midcentury transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to American consumer capitalism. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780226660158

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Engineered to Sell (Paperback)
• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022666015X
• ISBN 13: 9780226660158
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

The mid-twentieth-century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture—music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan L. Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research, and commercial design who transformed capitalism from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the “Americanization” paradigm. Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods and examines how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the emigrés at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. By focusing on the transnational lives of emigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the midcentury transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to “American” consumer capitalism.

About the Author

Jan Logemann is assistant professor at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen. He is the editor of The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective, and the author of Trams or Tailfins: Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States, also published by the University of Chicago Press.