Understanding Ordinary Women

The paper reflects on the ways market research in Britain helped produce understandings of and information about the ‘mass housewife’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper does this through a case study of the market research used and generated by the London subsidiary office of J. Walter Thompson advertising. The paper focuses on key client accounts, as well as the agency's non-product specific research, as a way of exploring how it sought to understand the ordinary housewife and her consumption habits. In exploring JWT London's approach to the ‘mass market’ housewife, the paper draws on recent sociological arguments about advertising and market research that have conceptualized these commercial practices as technologies or socio-technical devices for ‘making-up’ the consumer. However, the paper also seeks to revise certain aspects of this sociological approach. It does this by proposing a more differentiated sense of the various marketing and market research paradigms that were used by advertising agencies in order to contest the claim that post-war market research was subject to growing sophistication under the influence of the psychological sciences. Secondly, the paper seeks to bring a more international and specifically trans-Atlantic dimension to the understanding of post-war market research. US-derived techniques formed a visible presence within post-war British market research and constituted a key point of reference for British-based practitioners. This influence was neither totalizing nor did it go unchallenged, but even as they rejected elements of ‘American’ approaches to the consumer, British practitioners still had to reckon with their intellectual authority and commercial force in this period.