Postwar Consumer Culture and the Rise of Market Segmentation in the U.S.

This paper examines the shift to market segmentation in the U.S. between the late 1950s and the 1970s. It looks at market segmentation as an important development in consumer culture that helped sustain consumption and respond to changes in society. The shift to market segmentation began in the late 1950s amid the concerns over the saturation of the mass market. As a major change to mass consumption, market segmentation signaled the market’s embrace of difference and diversity in line with larger changes in American society, giving recognition to groups that had long been discriminated and thereby offering greater choices. At the same time, such changes only strengthened consumer culture, as marketers came to take advantage of social turmoil and divisiveness through market segmentation, incorporating developments that could have threatened a consumer culture under mass consumption. Lifestyle segmentation, as it developed in the 1970s, also indicated continued power of consumer culture. Marketers seized lifestyle segmentation to constantly divide up Americans. In particular, faced with the ever growing pressure to find new profitable segments beyond the existing ones, they came to highlight the divisive developments they could utilize in segmenting people. As this helped reinforce ongoing divisions and fragmentation, consumer culture did not simply respond to larger changes in society, but came to shape American society.