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

Abstract

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 the 1920s onwards in order to highlight the ‘right to choose’, vara-journalists turned to the metaphor in the postwar age of the consumer rights movement in an attempt to underline the importance of making the ‘right choice’. In the mid and late 1970s, finally, the narrative increasingly moved towards depoliticization.

This article is part of the special issue on consumption history.