“One Sight One Sound"? Marketing organization and advertising strategies of Western European consumer electronics companies during the “long” 1960s

A characteristic feature of the “long” 1960s in Western Europe was the enormous dynamism in the development of mass consumption. From the mid to late 1950s onwards, the seller's market of the immediate postwar period gave way to a situation of intensified competition. Producers of consumer goods increasingly sought to place consumers and their wishes at the center of their considerations rather than focusing on production. This was tied to a growing popularity of the marketing concept, the practical implementation of which would in many cases upend a company’s organizational structure (Berghoff, 2007) making it an interesting subject for enterprise case studies in business history.
Through a close reading of sources from company archives, this paper examines the internal adaptation processes of the marketing concept by three consumer electronics manufacturers (Philips, Braun & Telefunken). It is analyzed to what extent these companies implemented a marketing-oriented internal organizational structure. In a second step, this sectoral case study then investigates the impact of such organizational changes on advertising. A transnational perspective is taken on both levels of analysis, as all three studied companies were already acting on a multinational scale at the time (albeit to varying degrees).
The source analysis reveals that the internal company efforts towards more transnational homogenization and more centralized organizational control in the wake of the implementation of the marketing concept could be quite considerable, for example with regard to advertising budgets or the typographic design elements belonging to the core of a brand’s identity. In other areas, however, particularly concerning advertising media planning and the design of consumer-facing advertisements, the creative freedom of national subsidiaries tended to remain greater despite homogenization efforts on the organizational level.