Papers presented by Lisa Jacobson since 2019
2025 Atlanta, Georgia
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Lisa Jacobson, University of California Santa Barbara
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"War and the Limits of Reinvention: Consumers, Soldiers, and the Effort to Remake Alcohol's Public Image"
Lisa Jacobson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract:
The makers of American wine, beer, and whiskey recognized WWII as an opportunity to remake the image of these once-illicit commodities and broaden their base of consumers. Having halted beverage production to produce industrial alcohol for the synthetic rubber program, whiskey distillers had little need to sell whiskey—a prized good perpetually in short supply. Instead they launched a public relations campaign to tout the industry’s patriotic contributions to the war effort and battle public perceptions that distillers were deliberately withholding whiskey to gin up prices. Brewers and vintners created separate collective advertising campaigns that aimed to destigmatize wine and beer while also touting them as morale boosters, aids to wartime food crusades, and emblems of the good life servicemen were fighting to defend. Despite their well-organized advertising and public relations campaigns, alcohol producers and their network of allies were never in full command of alcohol’s cultural reinvention. Circumstances that the industry thought would redound to their benefit—the military’s decision to permit sales of low-alcohol beer in the Army PX, the reduction in European wine imports, the exposure of servicemen to wine-drinking cultures abroad—did not invariably play out to their advantage. This paper examines how consumers’ own experiences with unsatisfying substitutes for prized intoxicants, especially on the battlefront, alternately disrupted and bolstered the industry’s carefully crafted marketing messages. It complicates our understanding of how businesses reinvent the image of controversial commodities by foregrounding factors that business either failed to anticipate or lacked the power to control. To illuminate the limits of reinvention, this paper uses sources that voiced and represented the perspectives of consumers and servicemen: memoirs, war journalism, cartoons, GI gripe letters, marketing research.
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2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform
"Respect and Respectability: Black Consumers and the Politics of Beer Marketing in the Postwar United States"
Lisa Jacobson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract:
Beer companies, along with manufacturers of cigarettes and spirits, were among the first white-owned national and multinational corporations to recognize the untapped potential of the Black consumer market in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, many beer companies remained reluctant to pursue this market, even as aggregate consumer demand for beer flagged during the 1950s. This paper explores the reasons for such reluctance among American brewers, the myriad ways they misread the Black consumer market, and the lessons Black consumers taught both market researchers and American brewers when they boycotted beer brands and talked back to beer companies as the subjects of marketing research. Drawing upon Ernest Dichter’s marketing research studies, this paper examines how Dichter attempted to bring Black consumers into focus and illuminate the hidden motivations and aspirations that informed their allegiance to certain brands of beer. Dichter’s limited dataset helped him to puncture the myth of a monolithic Black consumer market, but his interpretations of that data often pointed beer marketers in directions that did not fully square with the comments of Black consumers. Dichter’s Black respondents offered an important and potentially disruptive lesson: that the power to shape the meaning of brands lay as much in the hands of ordinary consumers as it did in the hands of corporate marketers. Black consumers cared deeply about their cultural representation in beer ads and the popular entertainments beer companies sponsored, but Blacks from different classes and generations varied in their responses to perceived assaults on Black dignity. Black consumers appeared more unified in demanding that brewers repay their brand loyalty by hiring more Blacks to occupy better-paying positions. Respectability mattered, but respect mattered more.
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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"Respect and Respectability: Black Consumers and the Politics of Beer Marketing in the Postwar United States"
Lisa Jacobson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract:
Beer companies, along with manufacturers of cigarettes and spirits, were among the first white-owned national and multinational corporations to recognize the untapped potential of the black consumer market in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, many beer companies remained reluctant to pursue this market, even as aggregate consumer demand for beer flagged during the 1950s. This paper explores the reasons for such reluctance among American brewers, the myriad ways they misread the black consumer market, and the lessons black consumers taught both market researchers and American brewers when they boycotted beer brands and talked back to beer companies as the subjects of marketing research. Drawing upon Ernest Dichter’s marketing research studies, this paper examines how Dichter attempted to bring black consumers into focus and illuminate the hidden motivations and aspirations that informed their allegiance to certain brands of beer. Dichter’s limited dataset helped him to puncture the myth of a monolithic black consumer market, but his interpretations of that data often pointed beer marketers in directions that did not fully square with the comments of black consumers. Dichter’s black respondents offered an important and potentially disruptive lesson: that the power to shape the meaning of brands lay as much in the hands of ordinary consumers as it did in the hands of corporate marketers. Black consumers cared deeply about their cultural representation in beer ads and the popular entertainments beer companies sponsored, but blacks from different classes and generations varied in their responses to perceived assaults on black dignity. Black consumers appeared more unified in demanding that brewers repay their brand loyalty by hiring more blacks to occupy better-paying positions. Respectability mattered, but respect mattered more.