Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations, c. 1951–69 (Studies in Popular Culture) - Hardcover

Nixon, Sean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719085373 ISBN 13: 9780719085376

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2013

Synopsis

'This is an impressive piece of sustained research that brings much to the field. It offers real depth in rethinking the post-war boom and there can be little doubt that this will have a real impact across modern British history, consumer history and cultural studies.'
Jeremy Black, Professor of History, University of Exeter

Focusing on advertising’s relationship to the mass market housewife, Hard sell shows how advertising promoted new standards of material comfort in the selling of a range of everyday consumer goods and, in the process, generalised a cross-class image of the ‘modern housewife’ across the new medium of television. Nixon shows how the practices through which advertising understood and represented the ‘modern housewife’ and domestic consumption were influenced by American advertising and commercial culture. In doing so, he challenges the way critics and historians have often understood Anglo-American relations, and shows how American influences across a range of areas of advertising practice were not only a source of inspiration, but were also adapted and reworked to speak more effectively to the British consumer.

Hard sell offers a major new analysis of the techniques of advertising in the decades of post-war affluence and advertising’s relationship to the social changes associated with growing prosperity.

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About this title

About the Author

Sean Nixon is Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Essex

From the Back Cover

How did advertising shape growing popular prosperity in the 1950s and 60s? What were the images of domesticity and modern living which it promoted? Focusing on advertising’s relationship to the mass market housewife, Hard sell shows how advertising promoted new standards of material comfort in the selling of a range of everyday consumer goods and, in the process, generalised a cross-class image of the ‘modern housewife’ across the new medium of television.

Nixon shows how the practices through which British advertising understood and represented the ‘modern housewife’ and domestic consumption were influenced by American advertising and commercial culture. In drawing out these trans-Atlantic influences, Hard sell challenges the way critics and historians have often understood Anglo-American relations. It shows how American influences across a range of areas of advertising practice, including the development of television advertising, were not only a source of inspiration, but also were adapted and reworked to more effectively speak to the British consumer.

Through detailed studies of advertising, the practices of advertising agencies and the public debates that shaped their reception, Hard sell offers a major new analysis of advertising in the decades of post-war affluence and the Anglo-American exchanges that shaped advertising’s contribution to this period of social change. It marks a significant contribution to debates within contemporary British history, the sociology of affluence and to studies of consumer and marketing history.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719085373
• ISBN 13: 9780719085376
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240