Journal of Consumer Culture

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From Counterculture to Consumer Culture : Vespa and the Italian youth market, 1958 −78 Adam Arvidsson Journal of Consumer Culture 2001 1: 47 DOI: 10.1177/146954050100100104

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Journal of Consumer Culture

From Counterculture to Consumer Culture Vespa and the Italian youth market, 1958–78 ADAM ARVIDSSON University of East Anglia

Abstract. This article contributes to an analysis of the origins of contemporary post-

modern consumer culture, centred on the notion of lifestyle choice. It presents a case study of Piaggio’s marketing strategies for their motor scooters – the Vespa being the most famous one – during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Vespa had become an icon of the international youth culture already at the beginning of this period, it is argued that Piaggio’s advertising agency did not appropriate the counterculture on account of its quantitative importance. Rather, countercultural attachments were mobilized and made part of Piaggio’s advertising discourse first when they harmonized with visions for a future ‘postmaterialistic’ consumer society harboured by advertising professionals. They subsequently used new techniques of market research, like motivation research, to translate such countercultural attachments into a consumer culture centred on individual self-realization rather than collective rebellion. In the 1970s, it is argued, this new consumer culture was transformed into what is now known as ‘life-style consumerism’.

Key words

advertising consumer culture Italy lifestyle social construction ●







RECENTLY, A NUMBER OF SCHOLARS have emphasized the link between

the counterculture of the 1960s and contemporary post-Fordist capitalism. Some have shown how the social and labour movements of the late 1960s challenged and effectively undermined the Fordist order (for example, Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 1(1): 47–71 [1469-5405] (200106) 1:1; 47–71; 017441]

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Arrighi, 1994; Harvey, 1990;Wallerstein, 1999). Others, perhaps even more interestingly, have demonstrated how the new values, practices and moral visions that emerged within the counterculture have served to legitimize a general transformation of the ways in which production and consumption are governed and organized (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999). Concepts like ‘anti-authoritarianism’ and ‘self-realization’ have been appropriated and translated into central catchwords of the ‘new economy’ such as ‘flexibility’ or ‘lifestyle choice’. The ‘hippie-drug-rock-culture’ that Daniel Bell (1976) feared would be the end of American civilization has, it seems, instead supplied the ideological basis for its surprisingly persistent, post-Fordist phase of expansion (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The influence of the counterculture has been most visible, perhaps, in the field of consumption. There, as a number of scholars have shown, it has made personal ‘self-realization’ a central theme in marketing thought as well as advertising discourse (Frank, 1997; Leiss et al., 1986; McCracken, 1993; Sakamoto, 1999). Consumers today are thought to have not only material but also ‘post-materialistic’ needs and wants. The latter are intimately connected to the development and elaboration of their own ‘selves’. This supposedly takes place not through conformity but through active ‘lifestyle choices’. In contemporary consumer culture,‘the forging of personal identity has been firmly and pleasurably disentangled from the world of both work and politics and is carried out in a world of plural, malleable, playful consumer identities’ (Slater, 1997: 10; cf. Appadurai, 1997; Featherstone, 1991;Goldman and Papson,1998; Jameson,1991;Kellner,1995;Lash,1990; Lowe, 1995). In short, the counterculture has put the ‘choosing self’ at the centre of consumer culture (Sassatelli, 2000). Although the link between contemporary consumer culture and the counterculture of the 1960s has been suggested repeatedly, detailed empirical investigations of the more precise genealogy of this relationship are less frequent (Frank, 1997; Mort, 1996;Vanderbildt, 1998). In this article I hope to make a small contribution to that topic by presenting a case study of the marketing of Piaggio’s motor scooters (most notably the Vespa, but subsequently also Ciao, Sì and Bravo) during the 1960s and 1970s. In many ways, the story of the Vespa supplies an ideal case study: presented as a central component of the material culture of a new, modern, post-Fascist Italy in the immediate post-war years, the Vespa soon became something of a fetish for the emerging transnational counterculture. In addition, Piaggio was one of the first advertisers successfully to incorporate a countercultural language and imagery in its advertising, so much so that the Vespa campaigns of the late 1960s have become part of the Italian collective memory of 1968.1 48

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My story will, however, differ slightly from more traditional narratives of commodification or ‘colonization’. I will suggest that factors within the world of marketing and advertising were as important as the counterculture in promoting the shift in Piaggio’s advertising strategy. While my main purpose is to present an empirically grounded case study2 and I therefore do not want to overstate the case, I conclude by suggesting how it could be developed into a more general hypothesis as to the origins of contemporary consumer subjectivity.3

MOBILITY AND THE MIRACLE

Italy went through a substantial transformation in the post-war years. If the political optimism that had marked the period immediately after the war was effectively subdued by the electoral victory of the Christian Democrats in 1948, economic development, culminating in the ‘economic miracle’ of 1958–62, brought about profound material and, above all, cultural change. Even if the Italy of the early 1960s remained comparatively poor by European standards (with the exception of the ‘industrial triangle’ of the north [Therborn, 1995]), the rapid expansion of advertising and the media, according to contemporary observers, made consumer goods a central concern for most Italians, even (or particularly) those that could not possibly afford them.4 According to influential journalist Giorgio Bocca (1962), mass consumption now supplied a basis for national identity that had so far been virtually absent.5 The Vespa stood at the heart of this transformation. Designed by Piaggio engineer Corrado D’Asciano, who was influenced by contemporary leftist designers who aimed to promote cheap and popularly accessible consumer goods as part of a more democratic consumer culture, the Vespa became a quick success.6 Between 1956 and 1964 the number of scooters in circulation increased from 700,000 to 4.3 million (Ginsborg, 1990: 239). The market was neatly divided between Piaggio’s Vespa and Innocenti’s Lambretta. The scooter was sold as an intelligent Italian solution to the demand for mass transportation. Piaggio’s advertising stressed how the scooter enabled its users to have a share of the mobility that was a central component in modern life: ‘The Vespa will perform the miracle of shortening your work-hours and prolonging your leisure’, the copy ran (Rivista Piaggio, 1962). Piaggio also stressed its democratic appeal. The Vespa would work as an Italian alternative to the car, small, economical, aesthetically pleasing, full of technically sophisticated solutions and, above all, accessible to a comparatively poor consumer market (Giannetti, 1998): ‘The small car with two wheels’ (La piccola vettura a due ruote). In addition, Piaggio and 49

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Lambretta marketed their scooters as leisure-related tools for the formation of a new national consciousness. They both organized scooter clubs that set off to discover Italy during weekend trips (a consumerist continuation of ‘popular trains’ (treni populari) organized by the Fascist regime in the 1930s). Vespa was not only a means of transport, it was also something of a national icon. It enabled its users to participate in staging the Italian transition to modernity and prosperity (Lepre, 1995). Given its relatively affordable price and popular appeal, the Vespa became a prime object of desire for young workers. According to Crainz (1996), it was particularly popular in the countryside. Apart from its signvalue of ‘modernity’, it enabled young people to travel to dances and social events in other villages or even out in the fields where social relations could develop in a less controlled and supervised way. From existing sociological investigations, however, it seems that the mobility the Vespa gave to its younger users had rather destabilizing consequences.7 This manifested itself principally in three ways. First, mobility promoted an unsupervised sociality among young people; travelling on their scooters they would be able to meet and interact outside of parental or village supervision. This apparently facilitated the emergence of looser sexual liaisons - for young men (according to Baglioni, 1962: 100 ff.), possession of a scooter, or even more so a car, would more or less directly translate into enhanced sexual attraction, something that triggered the attention of Catholic moralists in particular. Together with lipstick, silk stockings and Hollywood films, scooters were thought to pose a serious threat to the moral stamina of the younger generation (Piccone-Stella, 1993). Second, scooters worked as a cheaper substitute for motorbikes, enabling the formation of gangs (bande) of working-class men who dressed in jeans and leather jackets, Marlon Brando-style, and behaved provocatively in public places. The public presence of such Italian ‘teddy boys’ triggered a sustained moral panic in which the younger generation was described as degenerate,depraved or even criminal, and harsh punishments were called for.8 Finally, the decision on the part of a young person to make a down-payment on a Vespa, or any other consumer good, effectively undermined the existing patriarchal family structure in which, as a rule, family members would give all of their income to the pater familias. From Alessandro Pizzorno’s (1960) study of a small town in the Milanese hinterland, it was evident that the attraction of consumer goods, to young people in particular, led to individualizing tendencies that posed a serious threat to the very survival of the old community. In the case of young people, it seems that the Vespa, rather than functioning as an icon for a new national unity, actually served to accelerate the 50

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disintegration of a pre-industrial social fabric, economically, socially as well as culturally. It contributed to creating the ‘historical gap’ between the old and the new generation,‘an abyss that stands between their different experiences of life’, that Pizzorno, among others, identified as one of the most visible consequences of modernization.

ADVERTISING AND THE YOUTH MARKET

This ‘abyss’ grew deeper towards the mid-1960s as a distinct countercultural youth culture began to develop. Here, too, the Vespa had a central place – at least in England, where middle-class youth, in the form of ‘mods’, made it a central element of their highly particular style (Hebdidge, 1988). With the increasing international reputation of ‘swinging London’ – and alongside Twiggy-style models, Mary Quant miniskirts and the Rolling Stones – the Vespa became something of an international countercultural fetish.9 Piaggio was by no means blind to the Vespa’s central place in international youth culture. On the contrary, every other issue of the company magazine, Rivista Piaggio, contained articles on the role of the Vespa in the lives of young people around the world. However, the magazine gave no special importance to the countercultural sign-value that the Vespa had acquired in British youth culture. Mods simply featured as one more curious exotic element, alongside American college youth, Stockholm Vespa rallies and adventurers setting off for the North Pole. Not even when British-style countercultural fashions began to be imported into Italy (by singers like Mina and Patty Pravo, venues like the Piper club in Rome and stores like the famous Cose in Milan) did Piaggio perceive this as a resource to be drawn on in marketing the Vespa. Piaggio shared this lack of interest with much of the Italian advertising profession. Even as the growth of the youth market, particularly in the USA, triggered calls by the Italian advertising press to ‘take youth seriously’, the Italian advertising industry was generally slow to discover youth as a particular consumer category. They either perceived young people as future adult consumers, or as deviants whose consumer practices and ways of life in general were too diverse to be productively utilized (Pasqualini, 1958). Their actual tastes and desires remained an ‘unknown continent’ even as late as 1967, when a conference on ‘Youth and the Market’, organized by the advertising trade journal L’Ufficio Moderno and the Genoa Chamber of Commerce, agreed that youth were to be considered a ‘new economic element’,one which would eventually determine also the attitudes of adults (Trombetta, 1967). Apart from the occasional public lecture on ‘Beat Culture’ – a blend of domestic and British countercultural elements that 51

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dominated the Italian youth scene (De Angelis, 1998; Echaurren and Salaris, 1998) – such as the one sponsored by the Turin salesmen’s association later in 1967, little was done to take youth seriously (L’Ufficio Moderno, 1967). Towards the mid-1960s,however,the problem of capturing young consumers became more pressing for Piaggio. Market research began to show that scooter-ownership was ‘transitory’; people tended to exchange their Vespa for a car as soon as they could afford to. In response, Piaggio began to elaborate a strategy that more explicitly targeted the youth market.10 The decisive move came in 1965, spurred by a change in traffic legislation: from that year, drivers of vehicles with engines larger than 50 cc had to have a driver’s licence. Vespa began producing a scooter with a 50-cc engine to avoid losing an important part of the market. As the lower age limit for driving any motor vehicle was 14, and the age limit for a driver’s licence was 17, Piaggio now found themselves with a product that directly targeted a teenage market, one very different from the working youth market at whom an earlier ‘Paradise for Two’ campaign had been directed. The first campaign for the new Vespa 50 therefore used the new teenage magazines that had begun to flourish in Italy to make the point that ‘You can drive it without a driver’s licence’. That was as far as Piaggio’s own internal marketing department would go. Instead, in 1966, they handed over the difficult task of capturing the new teenage market to the avant-garde advertising agency Leader.

CAPTURING THE COUNTERCULTURE: LEADER’S CAMPAIGNS

Leader had a reputation as a young and dynamic agency. Its creatives were keen to appear ‘with it’,always following the latest fads and using the newest techniques, if only to compensate for the agency’s location, in Florence, far from the traditional centre of Italian advertising in Milan (Grandini, 1971). Leader’s first move to target the youth market was to tap into the symbolic rhetoric of the contemporary teenage lifeworld. The theme of the campaign,‘You can do it with a Vespa’ (Con Vespa si può), stressed a theme that was by now well established among young Vespa users: the freedom and mobility that the Vespa made possible. The distinctly ‘beat’-style visual rhetoric of the ads, the vaguely adolescent-romantic style of the copy, together with the presence of popular singer, Gianni Morandi, in the accompanying television clip, Tempo di Shake (Time to Shake), further served to give the campaign a distinctly ‘young’ feel.11 Tapping in to beat culture was not enough, however. Leader’s creatives were well aware of the ‘gap’ that now separated young and old consumers. They knew that youth 52

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were different, that they made up a ‘society within society’ (Panorama della Pubblicità, 1962). Hence they sought to go further and give the scooter a particularly fetishistic quality that would set its users apart from mainstream consumer culture. Their first move was to develop a new and radically different symbol: the apple. It was first used in 1968 in a curious but very successful advertising campaign. Each ad contained different sets of symbols: stars, hearts, daisies, or images of the experiences that Vespa could give access to such as a beach at night, eating an apple in an empty field, and so on. All of these were framed by the contours of an apple. The accompanying slogan is difficult to translate: Chi ‘Vespa’ mangia le mele, chi non ‘Vespa’ no (Who ‘Vespa’ eats apples, who doesn’t ‘Vespa’ doesn’t). This is nonsensical out of context but is comprehensible if one reads each apple (set of symbols or images ) as representing an experience the Vespa could enable one to have. Someone who ‘Vespas’ could have experiences that were impossible without one. The apple thus stood for a series of experiences that together formed the ‘core’(!) of a way of life made possible by the product. It signified a particular way of experiencing and relating to one’s social as well as natural environment that was specific to Vespa users. The apple and the form of life it attempted to signify were the result of Leader’s creative brainstorming and rigorous pre-testing. Before launching the campaign they conducted in-depth interviews not only with youth, but with people of ‘every socio-economic category’ to find the symbol closest to the connotations they wished the Vespa image to convey. ‘The apple was understood as a symbol of nature, as a code-word for vitality.’ (This was on a conscious level by youth and ‘unconsciously’ by others, Rivista Piaggio, 1969a.) It symbolized ‘a simple and lively hedonism’ (Rivista Piaggio, 1969b). The symbolism of the apple would work ‘in depth’ to present Vespa as a counterpoint to all that was not ‘nature’ or ‘a simple lively hedonism’: the city, pollution, chaotic traffic and the restricted mobility characteristic of urban Italy in the 1960s, as well as the constraints of family and constraining expectations that gave little space for discovery and freedom. As the slogan went: ‘A vroom on the Vespa and you leave those without fantasy behind.’ The apple was furthermore constructed as an exclusively young symbol. Pre-testing had established that people over 50 did not understand it, and the younger the audience, the closer the received meaning was to the product image Piaggio wanted to convey. As one of the brains behind the campaign, interviewed by Tamburini (1994), claimed, the apple by the very diversity of its communicative trope served to distinguish Vespa users from the consumer personalities of adult mass society: 53

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For young people between 14 and 18–20 years old, the expression ‘eats apples’ (mangia le mele) signified a capacity to embrace one’s own future, to let oneself go courageously and face the adventure of life. For older youth, between 20 and 25 years old, the expression had already acquired erotic connotations; it mixed with memories of Adam and Eve, the pleasures of sin. For more mature people, 25–30 years old, the erotic component had grown to the point of extreme brutality (fino alla brutalizzazione estrema ).‘Eats apples’ now meant the ability to drive one’s girlfriend to a solitary place in order to make love. For adults, for people over 50, the expression appeared downright offensive on account of its lack of conventional logic. (p. 144) The elaboration of a user identity that was not only different, but markedly distinct from the consumer culture of the adult generation was extended by incorporating anti-systemic, quasi-political associations. A vaguely formulated ‘critique of mass society’ served to distance the Vespa further from its main rival, the car. It enabled Piaggio to pitch the Vespa against the car, not, as previously, just as a cheaper alternative (that risked being abandoned as the consumer became more prosperous or grew up), but as the material foundation of a different, indeed antithetical ideological outlook. The opposition to cars was not only framed in terms of function, but also, or even mainly, in terms of the different forms of life that the two vehicles would enable. Vespa, and Piaggio’s new lightweight moped Ciao, were presented as vehicles that evaded the demands and expectations of mass society.They offered individual freedom and authentic experiences; moreover, they came in many different colours. They were contrasted with the ‘Sardomobili’, a term which combined ‘Sardines’ (sardine) and ‘Automobiles’ (automobili): the ‘Sardinemobiles’ represented not only the congestion of city traffic, but also the compulsion to follow the crowd and suppress one’s spontaneous instincts that this implied. But the Sardinemobiles stood for more than the Marcusian experience of the ordinary Italian traffic jam. The car was still the unchallenged symbol of the economic miracle, the hub around which everything circled, production (Fiat) as well as consumption. The car was a central component of what sociologist Francesco Alberoni (1964) called ‘citizenship goods’ (beni di cittadinanza), objects that enabled one finally to consider oneself an accomplished citizen. Putting the scooter in opposition to the car then gave it – if only on a vague and purely symbolic level – a certain countercultural or even subversive 54

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significance. This positioned Vespa and Ciao as the means of transport for a new generation, one for which individual freedom and following one’s heart had taken the sacred place that the car and its associated desire for integration had occupied for their parents. This opposition, between youth and ‘mass society’, was evident in the television advertisements which featured hippies who, in one case, occupied a train to ‘reanimate its passengers with their dreams’ pronouncing ‘senseless phrases’ (Giusti, 1995: 436–7). It was also evident in the slogans (see Figure 1), framed by drawings in the ‘countercultural’ graphic style popularized by the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ album, and by now thoroughly commercialized: The Sardinemobiles steal the air – those who ‘Vespa’ breathe. The Sardinemobiles eat asphalt – those who ‘Ciao’ eat strawberries. The Sardinemobiles don’t dream anymore – those who ‘Ciao’ are young. The Sardinemobiles have long noses – those who ‘Ciao’ are beautiful. The Sardinemobiles always clash – those who ‘Vespa’ love peace. Leader not only introduced a novel imagery into Piaggio’s advertising. They also aimed their campaigns at a new and radically different consumer subjectivity. The Vespa user who had hitherto figured in Piaggio’s advertising used his or her scooter to participate in the mass phenomenon of the economic miracle. For him, and sometimes her, the scooter was a way of becoming modern, of playing the role of a modern person. The young Vespa user that emerged in Leader’s campaigns, on the other hand, was interested in genuine experiences, in exploring life beyond the boundaries of any given social role and in developing an authentic, individual subjectivity in opposition to the constraining expectations of mass society. To quote Leader’s own characterization of the new Vespa user, driving a Vespa was about ‘freedom, independence, desire for integration outside of the family in the same age group with implications of emotional adventure’ as well as ‘emancipation, liberation from family bonds’ and ‘desire for selfaffirmation’ (Rivista Piaggio, 1969c). Where, then, did this new consumer subjectivity come from? From the look of Leader’s campaigns, it is obvious that the prevailing counterculture offered an important source of inspiration. But Italian ‘Beat’ culture, from which the language and imagery was principally drawn, had 55

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Figure 1: ‘The sardinemobiles eat asphalt. Those who “ciao” eat strawberries . . . Piaggio changes the world with two wheels.’ Probably the first representation of a hippie in Italian advertising 56

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been around for quite some time. It was also a fairly marginal phenomenon, directly involving perhaps a couple of thousand young people (De Angelis, 1998). Furthermore, to Leader’s creatives, contemporary youth culture, while rich in images and symbols to draw from, did not offer any particular values or models of behaviour. The social effervescence that undeniably welled up among young people seemed to lack any particular direction. As a core member of the campaign team, interviewed by Tamburini (1994), expressed his view of the events of 1968: We found ourselves in the midst of what seemed like a great fire that expanded in every direction. There were so many signals, and they were so strong that they became unclear. Often we had to guess from the results of our research, in a sometimes useless trial-and-error kind of way (spesso in un modo molto empirico e nemmeno suffragibile), what the main tendencies were, what was destined to last and make history. (p. 139) Indeed, behind this explosive creativity there was anomie: a ‘complete absence, within the cultural system of youth, of any important novelty as far as attachments or behavioral patterns went’.‘We found ourselves in front of a disenchanted mass of young people. It seemed like they had lost any sense of identity or of self.’ Indeed, Leader’s creatives felt that it was their duty to supply the younger generation with new values and behavioural models, to construct a new generational subjectivity for them to adopt. As one of Leader’s creatives expressed it: ‘to give young people a precise identity by making them appear, above all in their own eyes, as the bringers of new values in the field of interpersonal relations as well as that of society in general’ (Tamburini, 1994: 161–2). To do this, Leader relied on extensive market research. Markfield, the agency’s own market research company, conducted research on attitudes towards scooters on the part of young as well as adult consumers.The results of that research were subsequently used to legitimize the particular direction that their campaigns took (particularly in view of the fairly hostile reception that the apple campaign received from the conservative establishment, Rivista Piaggio,1969a).The market research that they used did not, however, serve to produce any representative picture of the values and attachments that were prevalent among young people. It did not ‘mirror’ the sentiments of the younger generation. Rather, Leader and Markfield relied on a highly particular brand of qualitative research that was currently in fashion: motivation research. Like most other qualitative methods, motivation research did not produce results with any general validity. 57

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Indeed, had they used quantitative methods they would probably have discovered that the kinds of attitudes that belonged to the new consumer subjectivity that they proposed were actually quite rare. According to most sociological surveys, the majority of young people still craved integration, desiring to take on the established roles of adult society as symbolized by the triad Macchina, Moglie/Marito e Mestiere (a car, a husband/wife and a job; Ardigò, 1966). In short, there was no clear-cut generational subjectivity ‘there’ to be appropriated. Rather, Leader’s creatives, driven by the ambition to diversify the market, manufactured one, putting together rather disparate elements of contemporary youth culture. The research technique that they employed, motivation research, played an important part in that process.

THE ROLE OF MOTIVATION RESEARCH

Motivation research was more than a new method of market research. It was part of a whole new philosophy that had come to dominate American marketing thought. It was developed in the years immediately after the war by Austrian émigré psychoanalyst, Ernst Dichter, who drew on his familiarity with Freudian psychoanalysis. Methodologically, the technique employed in-depth interviews that attempted to uncover previously hidden or repressed desires. Theoretically, Dichter’s vision contained a view of consumer goods as a kind of arena for the ‘development and enrichment of the personality’ that an overly bureaucratic and rationalized ‘industrial society’ would generally not allow. Consumption would supply compensation for the frustrations of an alienated life (Dichter, 1960; Horowitz, 1998). The ‘self’ that was to be developed and realized through the use of goods differed, however, from previous notions of selfhood within marketing thought. In contrast to earlier, behaviourist notions of consumer behaviour, Dichter saw the true source of needs in the often hidden desires of the unconscious. He saw the main source of frustration in industrial society as the repression of such desires by an everyday ‘iron cage of rationality’. Dichter’s analysis also contained a normative dimension. In a materialist society such hidden desires were usually of a higher, post-materialist order, to use Maslow’s (1953) now increasingly popular terms. People who no longer feared poverty and material deprivation wanted to develop themselves spiritually as individuals. Such desires inevitably came into conflict with what Dichter identified as a prevailing materialist, utilitarian and conformist mentality. The task of marketing and advertising was then to aid the ‘self’ in its struggle against society, to discover such hidden or repressed desires and render them socially acceptable through advertising, and to 58

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spread a progressive and emancipating ‘morality of hedonism’. Inspired by Dichter and other gurus like Geroge Katona, US marketing professionals began to think of consumer goods not merely as responses to existing needs and desires,but also as tools for the emergence of new,more advanced forms of subjectivity. Consumer goods would form the material basis of a ‘new civil religion of self realization’. Motivation research, as well as Dichter’s particular marketing philosophy, had gained a strong influence in Italy by the early 1960s. By relying on depth-probing qualitative methods, motivation research offered an efficient way to discover new market niches and opportunities. It was particularly popular in tackling what seemed to be the over-arching problem for Italian advertising professionals during the mid-1960s,‘consumer resistance’ (Arvidsson, 2000b). During the early 1960s the motivation research business mushroomed, the most important company being perhaps Misura, headed by the soon-to-be-famous sociologist, Francesco Alberoni, who formulated his own version of Dichter’s philosophy of emancipatory consumerism.12 Leader and Markfield made extensive use of motivation research in addressing the youth market. Arguably, the method contributed to their elaboration of a new consumer subjectivity in three important ways. First, on the most basic level, motivation research offered a new way to study and utilize previously ignored aspects of youth culture. By using qualitative methods to research consumer motivations, motivation research opened up the practice of marketing to outside influences in an unprecedented way. Previously, market research had mainly been a matter of nose counting, of quantitative estimates of the number of consumers that belonged to a particular socio-economic category, the desires or aspirations of which were already ‘known’. Moreover, its bias for ‘hidden’ or ‘repressed’ aspects of consumer motivations made it value observations that fell outside the established norm. By treating such ‘marginal’ manifestations of consumer motivations as the expressions of true but repressed desires, motivation research offered a language in which hitherto ignored aspects of consumer behaviour could be made sense of. Hence, aspects of youth culture that had so far been considered unintelligible or even pathological could now be translated into understandable elements of consumer demand. Through motivation research, young people could be made into a new market niche. Second, the theoretical bias of motivation research seems to have coloured Markfield’s interpretation of the counterculture. While there are no records of the actual interviews conducted by Markfield’s motivation researchers, excerpts published in Piaggio’s company magazine give a hint 59

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as to how the material was elaborated.13 In an interview published in 1972, a group of teenagers were asked how they experienced their Vespa. A 16year-old female high-school student from Milan, on vacation on the Riviera, answers: It’s difficult to explain what the Vespa means for me . . . especially when you’re at the sea-side. A bit of imagination and enthusiasm is enough to make each afternoon different. There are many examples . . . In the morning, of course, I go to the beach with my Vespa, but often the beach is too crowded and I don’t feel like swimming any more. Then my friends and me take our Vespas and go search for a place where we can be alone, and finally enjoy some true contact with nature. [Or we go up in the hills, to an empty field where] there is silence, the heat disappears, our bad mood vanishes and the crowds, the boredom of it all doesn’t scare us anymore. Another respondent, a 21-year-old male business school student, also from Milan, tells us about his experience of his Gilera 98, a light motorbike (also a Piaggio product): When the season begins it’s great to take the motorbike, with your girlfriend behind, to get out of the suffocating air of the city, and take a trip in the countryside . . . It gives you a feeling of freedom and happiness that can’t be explained. And the heat vanishes as soon as you start to move. . . . All this enables me to live my free time more intensely. A 16-year-old girl from Genoa: My Ciao is useful, especially when I’m on holiday. When the afternoons tend to be all the same, it’s great to have a way of escaping from the monotony of it all. These statements are meant to confirm that Leader was ‘right on target’ in presenting the Vespa as an instrument of individual freedom and emancipation from family ties as well as from the unpleasant aspects of mass society. However,they also seem perfectly ‘natural’comments by city youth on vacation. A Vespa objectively offers a certain amount of individual freedom, beaches are often crowded, the air is often hot and suffocating and Milan is infernal in the summertime – all of which can be cured by getting up into the hills or picking up speed on your motorbike. Being in a country house with your parents can bore you to death when you are 16 and a Ciao enables 60

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you to get away and meet other young people,‘escaping from the monotony of it all’. However,these desires – perhaps objectively given by the social situation of being a teenager on vacation with parents – were not taken at face value but rather read as symptoms of an underlying, unarticulated aversion to adult society or ‘civilization’. Summertime means, for everyone, living outdoors, a desire and search for that small piece of nature that for people today, every day more stifled by concrete and asphalt, represents the ideal relaxing solution and escape from the chaos of everyday life. [Our interviewees show] very diverse attitudes, from more rationalized to more spontaneous and instinctive, but they are all dominated by a relationship to the motor scooter characterized by creative intelligence and freedom. We have discovered an enthusiasm for any form of uncorrupted nature . . . as if they sought protection from the threatening adversaries that civilization and progress have created as a price for everyday comfort. (Rivista Piaggio, 1972) Desires that in themselves were ideologically neutral were interpreted as symptoms of a new generational subjectivity: a youthful subjectivity endowed with imagination and spontaneity in its quest for authenticity and opposition to the stifling rigour of mass society. Out of context, nothing in the young people’s answers (except, perhaps, the perception of crowded beaches and boredom as ‘frightening’) suggests such opposition to modern civilization. These are instead added in the elaboration of empirical observations on the part of the interviewer. This impression is further strengthened by an interview with a young female high-school student about how she relates to her Vespa. The interviewer is very keen to make the Vespa appear as a symbol of female emancipation. Asked,‘Do you think that the scooter has helped you to emancipate yourself?’,the interviewee is at first (understandably) somewhat puzzled,but the interviewer guides her to the right answers: Eh, um, in a way, yes, because before, perhaps a girl on a Vespa wasn’t judged too well. Because the motorbike, I don’t know, at least the larger ones were for boys, but now that has been overcome as well . . . Now you can see girls as well on motorbikes, big ones, much more then . . . so . . . I’d say they’re almost admired, but nobody judges them. 61

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So in that way you can say that the motorbike has been part of women’s emancipation? Yes, I think so. (Rivista Piaggio, 1969d) The connection between girls being able to ride a Vespa in public and women’s emancipation in general is made by the interviewer, not by the interviewee, who receives it as a ready-made proposal. Third, the self-against-society assumption that accompanied motivation research showed a close fit with the kinds of attachments furthered by the counterculture,particularly when those attachments had been filtered through the selective lens of the motivation interview. Influenced by motivation research, Italian marketing professionals, like their US colleagues (Frank, 1997),discovered that they thought in ways very similar to the emerging youth critique of mass society. This similarity allowed a view of the counterculture as a resource rather than as a problem. Leader’s creatives came to see the counterculture as an ally to be mobilized in the promotion of new kinds of relations between people and goods, rather than as the pathological manifestation of a marginal subject to be ignored, or, at the most, re-educated. The anti-authoritarian attachments of counterculture and the high value it placed on independent self-realization made it appear as an empirical corroboration to their hypotheses of a coming post-materialistic consumer society. Helping this new age into being by developing consumer goods that catered to a postmaterialistic user could then be a new way to legitimize their own practice. Indeed, Leader took a certain pride in these creative aspects of their work. They saw it as having fulfilled the morally worthy task of helping to bring about what the new generation needed most: a new way of living in society. . . . Piaggio has without doubt been a mayor player in responding to the demands of the young generation, offering them, through its vast range, not only efficient and technically perfect vehicles but, at the same time, virtual ‘socio-cultural instruments’ enabling them to acquire new ways of being and acting in today’s society. (Rivista Piaggio, 1971) Leader’s creatives did not discover the counterculture on account of its quantitative importance,which was negligible. Rather,it caught their attention because it corresponded to their normative vision of a coming postmaterialist age. They mobilized elements of its style and iconography and reassembled them into a new consumer subjectivity that was made to represent the younger generation. Motivation research offered an interface where this creative bricolage could take place. 62

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THE AFTERMATH

The idea that goods should be sold as the material foundations for new, post-materialistic forms of life became increasingly prevalent in marketing thought during the 1970s. Leader’s campaigns found many followers as youth became increasingly popular in advertising discourse as a symbol for an alternative way of life. As a logical step, the state Petrol Company AGIP began to market a particular petrol, Supercortemaggiore, to young consumers as conducive, according to the ads, to a similar, emancipating use of combustion-engines. Other typically youthful products, like jeans, beer and soft drinks, were soon to follow. With the success of countercultural fashion designers like Fiorucci and through the ongoing ‘creative revolution’ in advertising – where new and daring agencies like Agenzia Italia, responsible for the infamous ‘Jesus Jeans’ campaign of 1972, made downright blasphemous statements14 – ‘youth-as-opposition’ became an increasingly salient theme in Italian consumer culture. To be young and to be ‘anti’ became, it seems, all the rage, even for middle-aged consumers. ‘Never’, an article in the trade journal I prodotti di marca (Branded Goods) claimed,‘will middle-aged women be as young as they are now. They dress and behave like young people’ (I prodotti di marca, 1972). In the face of these transformations, marketing professionals began to argue that it was possible to ‘capture the adult consumer by means of youthful consumer models’,which meant an oppositional attitude that valued self-realization against the conformity of mass society (Studi di mercato, 1974). This drive towards a generalization of what had originally appeared to be youthful attachments was further aided by the crisis of the Fordist model in the early 1970s. The oil crisis of 1973 marked a real turning point as it opened up the marketing profession to the critique advanced by the social movements on the left. As previous expectations of growth could no longer be sustained, the basic source of marketing’s legitimization – that the production of ‘false needs’and the over-organization of mass society would contribute to raising standards of living – was undermined. Consequently, the advertising and marketing professions became increasingly self-critical.The errors of previous forms of marketing were criticized at a series of conferences not only for relying on permanent growth, but also for contributing to a bureaucratized and overly standardized society, for not giving enough importance to ‘the Subject’.15 While many of the points made by the social movements of the left were well taken, their radical critique of capitalism also seemed, in the eyes of the marketing profession, to testify to a general value crisis (Calvi, 1975). More than anything else, it seemed, people now needed new things to believe in. Youth, or rather the post-materialist attachments attributed to 63

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youth in marketing thought, seemed to provide a viable alternative. Indeed, youth culture seemed to herald the birth of a new subjectivity, a new ‘worker and consumer’, with needs, values and desires that were different from those of the denizens of the consumer society of the economic miracle (Ansoff, 1972). This seemed particularly true in the USA, a country that had always been regarded as something of a forerunner (Reni, 1976). In a forthcoming ‘post-materialistic’ consumer society, it was thought, people would develop needs for goods that could function as tools for creativity and self-experimentation. An adequate answer to the impending value crisis, therefore, was to promote consumer goods as the material basis for a new post-materialist outlook. Italian marketing professionals began to speak of their work as a matter of ‘creating new forms of life’, ‘new ways of living in society’ centred on the use of consumer goods (Ravelli, 1976). Piaggio and Leader remained at the vanguard of this new approach to marketing, in particular when they targeted the adult market with two new models, Bravo and Sì. Bravo was initially positioned as a scooter that would enable a new, more emancipated form of femininity. Driven by the increasing public impact of Italian feminism, in the late 1960s, Piaggio had commissioned a series of motivation studies on the ‘psychological attitudes’ of women towards their scooters. It emerged that: The fundamental components of women’s psychological attitudes towards motor scooters are exhibitionism and an experience of emancipation. The first theme corresponds to a need, basic to the female constitution, of attracting the attention of others. The other to a need for autonomy and selfaffirmation. (Bolodrini and Calabrese, 1994: 65) For women, it seemed, the scooter had mainly a psychological value. More than any other pragmatic concern, mobility meant autonomy, visibility and self-affirmation. To be able to drive around freely meant to be able to control one’s life, if only on a symbolic level. The result was a campaign that stressed that the scooter’s mobility enabled a new, more autonomous and emancipated kind of femininity. As the copy suggested: ‘On a Bravo you are your own boss.You can go where you want, when you want. Always’ (Figure 2). New market research in the mid-1970s showed that Bravo and Sì had accrued somewhat nostalgic connotations. They were preferred by an older generation that had outgrown Ciao’s distinct teenage appeal but who nevertheless conserved a youthful attitude to life. The ensuing campaign,‘Gente 64

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Figure 2: ‘On Bravo you are your own boss . . . with a thousand ideas that pass through your head, your desires, your emotions.’ Female subjectivity (literally) in the marketplace

solare’, made a point of presenting Bravo and Sì as tools for an adult form of self-realization,a scooter for ‘those who always look for new experiences, who re-invent themselves every day’. In Piaggio’s advertising, mobility and self-realization had now been stripped of their connotations of opposition, and transformed into foundational elements of a new way of living in society, based on the use and possession of a scooter. Self-realization no longer took place against anything, and mobility was no longer a matter of escape and finding spaces of freedom. It was rather a purely psychological kind of escape. Mobility meant the capacity to relate to one’s self as an unfinished, open-ended project,‘to reinvent oneself every day’. This new kind of mobile subjectivity was also considered to have a general appeal. Piaggio’s new scooter 65

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would promote a way of life – or life-style, as the term would be in the 1980s – ‘in between male and female, old and mature, rich and poor’. Their scooters catered to a new kind of consumer subjectivity that had been disconnected from traditional social categories like gender, class or age, or, to repeat the quote from Don Slater that was featured in the introduction: ‘pleasurably disentangled from the world of both work and politics’.

CONCLUSION

During the 1970s, marketing professionals began to treat their objects, consumers, as conscious and reflexive agents, much as Herbert Blumer had recommended sociologists do some 10 years earlier. Moreover, they put the ‘self’ at the very centre of their discourse, treating the self and its development, realization or affirmation as the ultimate source of consumerist needs and desires. This led to a view of consumers as determined primarily by their own ‘lifestyle choices’ rather than by structural factors like age, sex and class. Consumers now seemed to be ‘a priori socially displaced’, to use Niklas Luhmann’s famous phrase. Many sociologists have acknowledged this by now rather pervasive life-style consumerism. Many have considered it a reflection or a distortion of an actual secular trend in which the ‘self’ has been progressively ‘set free’ (Giddens, 1991) from social structure and rendered increasingly open to conscious, reflexive elaboration. Late modernity, in this account, forces us to view ourselves as open-ended ‘projects’; lifestyle consumerism is nothing but the commercial exploitation of this general existential condition. According to Zygmunt Bauman (1992: 189), the now generalized needs of ‘personal and self-definition, authentic life and personal perfection’ are exploited by a consumer culture that translated into ‘the possession of desired goods and artificially framed styles of life’. The case of the Vespa, while too marginal to support any kind of generalizations, nevertheless suggests that this might be an overly simplistic interpretation. Here, the emergence of a new consumer subjectivity was not a matter of reflecting an actually ongoing value change. Rather, this new subjectivity was partly invented by Leader’s creatives. In that process they drew on the emerging counterculture, as well as on developments within marketing thought. It seems to have been a matter of parallel articulation. New discursive visions of consumer subjectivity and new structures of everyday life developed simultaneously. At a certain point they locked into each other to form a ‘composite network’ (Callon, 1986) of system and lifeworld elements, out of which the new consumer subjectivity emerged. While such a hypothesis must be developed through further research, the Vespa case does indicate that neat distinctions between ‘system’ and 66

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‘lifeworld’ are sometimes too simplistic and that, as Fredric Jameson (1991) has famously suggested, economy and culture are deeply entwined.

Notes

1. The Newspaper Il Manifesto (19 June 1999) included the successful product image of the Vespa campaigns, the apple (see Figure 1), in an iconography of 1969 celebrating its 30th anniversary. Singer Vasco Rossi attempted to characterize the dull atmosphere of the early 1980s Riflusso (Backlash) with the phrase: ‘chi non Vespa più e si fa le pere’ (‘who doesn’t Vespa anymore and takes pears’, i.e. shoots up heroin). (Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Italian are my own.) 2. My study is based on the company archives of the Fondazione Piaggio at Pontedera, most notably the company magazine, Rivista Piaggio, as well as Italian advertising and marketing trade journals. 3. By this term I refer to something like the attachments and behaviors, the ‘forms of personhood’ (Hacking, 1986), that advertising invites us to assume. (The referent would be Althusser, 1984[1970], rather then the Hegelian tradition.) While I would agree that actual consumers might re-appropriate and creatively re-elaborate such suggestions, that they possess agency and reflexivity in relation to commercial culture, my study is chiefly concerned with the discourse of advertising. A study of what Vespa-users actually did with and thought of their scooters would be highly interesting, but it would require different sources and employ different methods. For an attempt along those lines, see Hebdige, 1988. 4. While private consumption grew by roughly 30 percent between 1951 and 1958, the turnover of the advertising industry expanded by 150 percent in the same period, 1951–9 (Arvidsson, 2000a:145–9). 5. Seton-Watson’s (1967) famous statement that the newly unified Italy was a ‘state without a nation’ remained largely true all through the Fascist period, despite all efforts on the part of the regime. 6. The Vespa was born as an innovative way to use the unsellable stock of airplane starter engines that Piaggio – an airplane manufacturer – was left with after the war. D’Asciano had seen pilots build scooters around them and decided to develop the concept. On post-war ‘democratic design’, see Branzi, 1999; Sparke, 1988;Woodham, 1997. 7. The many sociological investigations of youth and youthful consumer practices should be taken with a grain of salt. Many tended to project American fears of an emerging mass society and of youth as a lost generation onto Italian reality, with sometimes distorting consequences (Piccone-Stella, 1998: 159). 8. The epithet ‘teddy boys’ was basically inadequate and inspired mainly by the preceding British moral panic. The young working-class men in question dressed rather like Marlon Brando and his consorts in The Wild One of 1953. 9. On fetish, see the excellent discussion by Tim Dant (1999). 10. Gennaro Boston Associati (1966),‘Attegiamento del publico verso il motoscooter’, p. 6 (unpublished market research), in Tamburini (1994: 126). 11. Morandi, one of the more famous teenage idols of the 1960s, emerged as one of the ‘ye ye’ singers (together with Rita Pavone) in the mid-1960s. Compared to 67

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12. 13. 14.

15.

the distinctively transgressive Pavone, Morandi had a much more clean-cut image. Nonetheless, his status as a youth idol, and as an exponent of an artistic style that was incomprehensible to adults, conveyed a distinct countercultural connotation. On Gianni Morandi, see Balestrini and Moroni, 1997; Donadio and Giannotti, 1996. While comparative figures are unavailable, one of the Italian pioneers of market research, Gian-Paolo Fabris (1967), maintains that its influence in Italy was greater than anywhere else; see Alberoni (1964) for more details of his philosophy. It is unclear whether the interviews quoted come from market research made by Leader/Markfield, or if they were conducted by the journalists of Piaggio’s company magazine (or if they were just made up). Quoting from the gospel,‘Chi mi ama mi segue’ (‘May those who love me follow me’), Agenzia Italia showed a shapely female behind clad in a tight pair of ‘Jesus Jeans’. More than its sexism the advertisement made quite a row on behalf of its explicit blasphemy. In a famous article Pier-Paolo Pasolini (1990) saw it as a sign that Italy had finally left its pre-industrial state and entered the era of ‘neocapitalism’ (neocapitalismo) where religion no longer fulfilled any essential ideological function. Rifondazione del Marketing, L’Ufficio Moderno, May 1975; XVIII Convegno AISM,Verona, 1974; XIX Convegno AISM, Parma, 1975; Produzione, comunicazione, consumo, Convegno FEPI,TP, UPA, Milano, 1974. Another important source of self-critique was the recent American literature stressing the ‘limits to growth’, in particular the famous MIT report, translated into Italian in 1972 as Aa.Vv., I limiti dello sviluppo. Milano: Mondadori.

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Wallerstein, I. (1999) Utopistics: Or Historical Choices for the Twenty-first Century. New York: The New Press. Woodham, J.W. (1997) Twentieth-Century Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Adam Arvidsson is a lecturer in sociology at the University of East Anglia. His research concerns the relation between social theory and mass consumption, and he is developing a project on the role of social science in the promotion of mass consumerism during the postwar period. Address: School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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