There also emerged a current of opinion in the early 1970s that consumers had, as a result of bitter experience, become much savvier, having over time developed a resistance to the marketing tricks of big business. In 1974, for example, Melville J. Ulmer, a marketing expert, reviewing a book about growing consumer resistance entitled The Day the Pigs Refused to be Driven to Market, opined that consumers had wised up to the mid-century marketing repertoire of selling techniques, including planned obsolescence. If this assessment is accurate, then the rather mechanical marketing ploy of changing models every year might have become too transparent as a ruse to continue to persuade consumers to trade in last year’s model for a new one. Style changes, in order to do their marketing work, would consequently have to be more subtly indexical of added value, or else more organically connected to the drift of aesthetic taste. Perhaps the sense that people were becoming more knowledgeable and sophisticated presaged the turn in advertising to the use of irony, which presupposes a knowing consumer, wise to the ways of cruder sales pitches.
The waning of planned obsolescence did not, however, mean a return to the simple, functional principles of Fordist product design, exemplified by the model T. Systematic style obsolescence was now a permanent feature of the consumer economy, only implemented in a less regular and formulaic fashion than had been the case in the automobile industry. Moreover, technical obsolescence increased toward the end of the century, with consumer products ever more dependent on fast-changing technology. This produced, as Giles Slade (2006) chillingly charts, a problem of so-called e-waste of horrific and growing proportions. What did ebb, however, is the particular set of concerns about planned obsolescence that had been expressed in the middle years of the century. It is rare in the contemporary world to encounter the opinion, which was common in the 1950s and 1960s, that product changes per se exert an almost coercive efect on the consumer. Nor are rants about built-in product “death dates” to be found nearly as frequently in public discourse. The question arises, therefore, of why these concerns lost much of their force toward the end of the twentieth century. And, indeed, why did they emerge as and when they did earlier in the century?
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Time for Things