The Therapy of Consumption Motivation Research and the New Italian Housewife, 1958-62

Abstract

This article describes the transformation of the image of the housewife-consumer in Italian advertising during the ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing on market research, professional debates and advertising campaigns it argues that motivation research - an originally American market research technique with Freudian origins - was crucial in altering the ways in which advertisers and marketers related to women consumers. Motivation research made advertisers and marketers conceive of consumers as endowed with an intrinsic desire for self realization. The qualitative methodology that it introduced also allowed the marketing profession to observe and absorb the new ways of life that were proposed by the counterculture and the women’s liberation movements of the early 1960s. Towards the early 1970s these elements blended into a distinctly ‘emancipated’ advertising discourse, a ‘commodity feminism’ where women consumers were encouraged to use consumer goods to mark off an autonomous, individualized subjectivity, rather than to ensure the compliance with traditional gender roles.

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