King Customer. Contested Conceptualizations of the Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in the Netherlands, 1920s-1980s

This article examines the question of how transnationally traveling narratives of consumption have made sense of an emerging modern Dutch consumer society. It particularly focuses on the way in which the King Customer metaphor entered the Netherlands in the interwar years as an Anglo-American advertising industry effort to co-opt democratic aspirations for the market, and how it was appropriated and re-interpreted in a distinctive national context by a variety of historical actors in the decades to follow. Whereas proponents of the Dutch retail industry used the figure of King Customer from th... Mehr ...