Despite the eforts of business to defuse the issue, by the early 1960s planned obsolescence had become a matter of widespread concern, to the point that many prominent business and marketing figures, and some professional bodies, felt the need to publicly distance themselves from the practice. In 1962, the American Marketing Association became suficiently concerned about the suggestion that its members were participants in a conspiracy to push planned obsolescence on the consuming public that it issued a broad call to arms to the profession, insisting that the matter needed to be forthrightly addressed. The argument the organization made was that what was needed in response to accusations about the marketing of planned obsolescence was a public relations campaign on behalf of marketing itself. D. Beryl Manischewitz and John A. Stuart, two prominent marketing executives, likewise drew attention, in an article published in the July issue of the Journal of Marketing, to the need for the advertising industry to take a more active stance in defending itself. They suggested that one way to accomplish this would be for marketers to preempt criticism by launching a systematic investigation into supposed practices of “planned obsolescence” and “administered prices” (Maniscewitz and Stuart 1960). The supposition was that the results of such an investigation would clear the industry of wrongdoing.57 The authors accepted the moral logic on the basis of which planned obsolescence was regarded as an objectionable practice—the issue was not whether planned obsolescence is a bad thing or not, but rather whether or not the practice, as imagined by Packard and other critics, actually existed.
Moral Panic about Utility
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