Commercial Intimacy : Affinity and the Marketplace.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Popp, Richard.

Contributor:

Malin, Brenton.

Woloson, Wendy A.

Series:

Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture Series

Language:

English

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (326 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Summary:

Explores how marketers have leveraged feelings of personal familiarity in modern consumer capitalismOur wired world connects us with corporations in ways that, just a generation ago, would have been hard to imagine. Marketers track users’ habits down to the swipe and scroll; brand influencers reach out to followers in ever more personal ways. Yet, however much we may feel individually recognized (or targeted) by today’s marketers, the connections they make are, in truth, fleeting and tactical. They are also nothing new. Marketplace transactions have long been mediated by interactions that blur the line between the putatively public and rational world of commerce and the supposedly private and emotional realm of personal relations. That there is an affective tenor to every sales scenario has never been a secret to talented marketers.How, exactly, marketers have tried to set those moods by endowing commercial relationships with an aura of personal affinity is the subject of Commercial Intimacy. Its chapters explore the broad theme of commercial intimacy (that is, market-based feelings of spatial and emotional closeness) in US consumer culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. They show how experiences of intimacy have been orchestrated by marketers operating at a variety of distances, from the face-to-face solicitations made by retail clerks and direct-sales agents to the long-distance appeals made by mail-order merchants, print and TV advertisers, telemarketers, and e-commerce platforms. The volume pays especially close attention to how these revenue-minded acts of ingratiation worked, how they were shaped by the technologies behind them, and how they capitalized on contemporary dynamics of gender and sexuality. At the heart of this volume, then, is the question of how our understanding of business history changes when we take the emotional, sensational, and affective dynamics of intimacy to be foundational elements of commercial persuasion.Contributors: Samuel Backer, Jennifer M. Black, Donna J. Drucker, Isabelle Marina Held, Julie A. Johnson, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter, Stephanie Kolberg, Brenton J. Malin, Cynthia B. Meyers, Richard K. Popp, Nicole E. Weber, Wendy A. Woloson.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Intimate Commerce

PART I Mediated Intimacies

CHAPTER 1 “Letter Salesmanship”: American Direct Mail Technologies and Techniques in the Early Twentieth Century

CHAPTER 2 “Such a Feeling of Intimacy”: Familial Bonds and Eastman Kodak’s Sponsorship of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet

CHAPTER 3 “Be Lean with Jean”: Jean Nidetch and the Intimacies of Weight Watchers

PART II Face-to- Face Encounters

CHAPTER 4 “Magnetism Was in Her Touch”: Music, Gender, and Commercial Intimacy at the Department Store Sheet Music Counter

CHAPTER 5 Nylon, Intimacy, and the Commercial Power of Touch

CHAPTER 6 “With Unhurried Ease”: Avon’s Affective Approach to Constructing Intimacy

PART III Selling Intimacy Itself

CHAPTER 7 The Emergence of the Marriage Market in Antebellum America

CHAPTER 8 “Wonders for the Health of Women”: Marketing Contraceptives in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era

CHAPTER 9 Birth of a Brand: Intimate Strategies of Sale and the Making of Marie Stopes’s Global Birth Control Brand

CONCLUSION Commercial Intimacy from the Analog to the Digital Age

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781512827514

1512827517

OCLC:

1492224555