TY - BOOK ID - 85593822 TI - Engineered to Sell : European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism PY - 2019 SN - 022666029X 022666015X 022666001X 9780226660011 9780226660158 PB - Chicago : University of Chicago Press, DB - UniCat KW - Marketing KW - Consumers KW - Immigrants KW - Consumer goods KW - Domestic marketing KW - Retail marketing KW - Retail trade KW - Industrial management KW - Aftermarkets KW - Selling KW - History. KW - Business History, Consumer History. KW - Design History. KW - Elite Migration. KW - Emigration. KW - History of Capitalism. KW - Knowledge transfers. KW - Marketing History. KW - Transatlantic Relations. KW - Transnational History. KW - Westernization. KW - Marketing - United States - History KW - Consumers - United States KW - Immigrants - United States UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:85593822 AB - Forever immortalized in the television series Mad Men, 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 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. First, Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods by emphasizing changes in marketing approaches increasingly tailored to consumers. Second, he looks at how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the émigrés 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. These mid-century consumer engineers crossed national and disciplinary boundaries not only within arts and academia but also between governments, corporate actors, and social reform movements. By focusing on the transnational lives of émigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the mid-century transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to "American" consumer capitalism. ER -