The suggestion that there was a pervasive conspiracy to limit product durability stung industry and marketing enough to prompt public relations campaigns to debunk the notion. In 1964, Burson-Marsteller Inc., Chicago-based marketing and public relations firm, took out a series of full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal defending the activities of marketing firms against Packard’s accusations.50 The ad begins: “Some of our best friends are wastemakers. They waste the ordinary for the unique. They waste the possible for the impossible, the good for the better, the old for the new.” The argument, often wheeled out in the back and forth over planned obsolescence, was that obsolescence is a result of progress. “Product innovation makes waste, say the critics of American marketing,” the ad went on, “They say that innovation will shorten the life-span of a product, create dissatisfaction, and proliferate products. They are right, of course. But is it immoral to innovate?”51 Herman F. Lehman, head of Frigidaire, likewise promoted the idea of planned obsolescence as the handmaiden of technical progress. He contrasted the technical dynamism encouraged by frequent product changes with the stasis implicit in the design philosophy championed by Ransom E. Olds, father of the Oldsmobile. Lehman noted disparagingly, and with the implication of naivety, that, in 1912, Olds had referred to his vehicle as “my farewell car” because, “I do not believe that a car materially better will ever be built” (Olds was expressing an attitude similar to Henry Ford’s to the model T).52
In order to put a positive spin on the marketing and industrial strategies associated with planned obsolescence, the automobile industry adopted alternative names for the practice, using terms that imply that obsolescence is an inevitable byproduct of the march of progress. Planned obsolescence was referred to as “dynamic obsolescence,” “progressive obsolescence,” and “planned progress.” John F. Gordon, GM head, in a 1960 statement on the issue put it as follows: “It is clear to me that new car buyers have benefited tremendously over the years from what has been termed planned obsolescence but which we think is more accurately called dynamic obsolescence.”53 James R. Roche, who succeeded Gordon as president of GM, echoed this defense of the auto industry against accusations of “wasteful planned obsolescence,” describing yearly style changes as “planned improvements” and “planned creativity,” which, he argued, “stimulates sales by ofering improved quality, safety and performance” each year.54 Robert F. Hurleigh, president of Mutual Broadcasting System Incorporated, averred that widespread planned obsolescence was a figment of the public’s imagination, that the practice “is the exception, not the rule of industry” and that what was really being spoken about in most discussions about “planned obsolescence” was just progress, plain and simple. Writing in the MBS newsletter, Of Mutual Interest, Hurleigh contended that: “The great majority of American manufacturers do not ‘plan’ obsolescence. They plan progress,” and that, “in the process of knocking ‘planned obsolescence,’ some authors have made enough money to ‘obsolete’ many of their own previous conceptions of how they would like to live.”55 Perhaps in response to the eagerness of industry to associate obsolescence with progress, the argument was made, in the late 1960s, that modern science itself—the supposed engine of progress—had been corrupted and co-opted by the industrial logic of planned obsolescence. The suggestion was that it was not that planned obsolescence served the forces of “progress” but rather the converse—that the forces of progress had come to serve planned obsolescence.56
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Time for Things