"'Consumer Dynamics': Racialized and Gendered Profiles of Supermarket Shoppers in the 1960s and 70s"

This paper explores how retail market segmentation post-1960 relied on statistical abstractions interpreted through midcentury ideologies of race and gender to fashion representations of racialized consumer markets, both urban and suburban. With the refinement of psychographics during the 1960s and 70s, marketers combined demographic and psychological attributes to label market segments, drawing hard distinctions based on normative assumptions of race, class, gender, and age. Using primary sources from the J. Walter Thompson Archives at the Hartman Center at Duke University, I reveal how, in the firm’s research files, the normative food shopper is constructed as white, “middle class,” and shifting their residence to the growing metropolitan suburbs and Sun Belt. As categories crafted out of government census data and advertising demographic research, non-normative consumer segments emerge as discrete and important objects of analysis in the late-60s and 70s. With the deep, systemic, and dire effects of deindustrialization on central city communities of color, such as Newark, Cleveland, and St. Louis, not yet fully apparent in the intellectual milieu of marketers, the capacity of advertising and marketing strategies to assimilate affected urban neighborhoods into the economic mainstream was pitched as a viable remedy to the urban crises. This discourse of marketing efficiency corresponded to a perception among economists and policymakers that refined marketing strategies among retailers could effectively respond to the perceived market anomalies that were responsible for the persistence of urban poverty. This paper argues that the opposite effect took place: relying on refined marketing techniques and consumer research, major supermarket chains closed their city stores and shifted their gaze toward normative consumer bases.