From Selling Soap to Selling Sustainability: Social Marketing

摘要

Sixty years ago, Americans greeted the postwar era with a thrift-based value system that had gotten them through two decades of war and economic depression. Corporate industry, meanwhile, exited the war capable of producing more goods than ever. But with the soldiers they once supplied now back home, they needed a new customer base. If only industry could reverse the thrift-based values of the American people, then their ramped-up infrastructure could continue pumping out goods, which would be readily bought by willing consumers. Enter Madison Avenue. Marketers responded to industry's challenge decisively, taking a dramatic leap forward in marketing sophistication. They rejected the typical fact-based approach of advertisements in favor of an identity-based, storytelling construct. The result? They created a radical reversal of thrift values and an explosion of consumerism that ignited in the United States in the 1950s and spread around the world. This became the era when people met the Marlboro man and came to believe that the cigarette someone smoked said a lot about who the person was.