Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T06:35:59.210Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Marketing Gum, Making Meanings: Wrigley in North America, 1890–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Daniel Robinson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay is a business and cultural history of Wrigley marketing in North America from the 1890s until the early 1930s. Wrigley relied on wholesalers at a time when consumer goods makers were expanding their sales forces. A prolific advertiser, Wrigley provided favorable terms to retailers carrying chewing gum, countering the view that advertising, by enabling direct communication between manufacturer and consumer, diminished retailer clout in the chain of distribution. Wrigley advertising constructed meanings on multiple levels, discussed here with the theoretical tools of liminality and semiotics. The text of Wrigley ads championed relief for two modern conditions: indigestion and stress. The imagery, mainly that of the liminal “Spearman,” evoked notions of unworldly escape and infantile nostalgia. The ads were richly polysemic. Accordingly, Wrigley's widespread popularity and market dominance by 1930 should be assessed in terms of both marketing function and representational process.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 4 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2004. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Books

Angle, Paul M. Philip K. Wrigley: A Memoir of a Modest Man. Chicago, 1975.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris, 1957.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. Le Système des Objets. Paris, 1968.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. La Société de Consommation. Paris, 1970.Google Scholar
Beasley, Ron, Danesi, Marcel, and Paul Perron. Signs for Sale: An Outline of Semiotic Analysis for Advertisers & Marketers. Ottawa, 2000.Google Scholar
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgewood to Corning. Baltimore, Md., 2000.Google Scholar
Bonnell, Victoria E., and Hunt, Lynn. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley, Calif., 1999.Google Scholar
Brown, JoAnne. The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930. Princeton, N.J., 1992.Google Scholar
Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Ithaca, N.Y., 2001.Google Scholar
Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.Google Scholar
Burnham, John C. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History. New York, 1993.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass., 1977.Google Scholar
Cronin, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York, 1991.Google Scholar
Darby, Edwin. The Fortune Builders. Garden City, N.J., 1986.Google Scholar
Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York, 1984.Google Scholar
Delamar, Gloria T. Mother Goose: From Nursery to Literature. Jefferson, N.C., 1987.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, Ind., 1976.Google Scholar
Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. Boston, 1989.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, Robert. Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862-1969. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.Google Scholar
Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. Urbana, Ill., 1997.Google Scholar
Hadida, Sophie C. Manners for Millions: A Correct Code of Pleasing Personal Habits for Everyday Men and Women. New York, 1932.Google Scholar
Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven, Conn., 1982.Google Scholar
Harp, Stephen L. Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France. Baltimore, Md., 2001.Google Scholar
George Burton, Hotchkiss, and Franken, Richard B.. The Leadership of Advertised Brands. Garden City, N.J., 1923.Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley, Calif., 1989.Google Scholar
Johnston, Patricia. Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography. Berkeley, Calif., 1997.Google Scholar
Johnston, Russell. Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising. Toronto, 2000.Google Scholar
Kellner, Douglas, ed. Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Oxford, U.K., 1994.Google Scholar
Kemp, H. R., ed. Canadian Marketing Problems. Toronto, 1939.Google Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca, N.Y., 1985.Google Scholar
Laird, Pamela Walker. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore, Md., 1998.Google Scholar
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York, 1994.Google Scholar
Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York, 1994.Google Scholar
MacDougall, J. B. The Real Mother Goose: The Reality behind the Rhyme. Toronto, 1940.Google Scholar
Makaryk, Irena, ed. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Toronto, 1993.Google Scholar
Manning, M. M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville, Va., 1998.Google Scholar
Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley, Calif., 1985.Google Scholar
Marchand, Roland. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. Berkeley, Calif., 1998.Google Scholar
Meikle, Jeffrey L. American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J., 1995.Google Scholar
Monod, David. Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing, 1890-1939. Toronto, 1996.Google Scholar
Mukerji, Chandra, and Schudson, Michael, eds. Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Berkeley, Calif., 1991.Google Scholar
Norris, James D. Advertising and the Transformation of American Society, 1865-1920. New York, 1990.Google Scholar
Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. London, 1996.Google Scholar
Parr, Joy. Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years. Toronto, 1999.Google Scholar
Pease, Otis. The Responsibilities of American Advertising: Private Control and Public Influence, 1920-1940. New Haven, Conn., 1958.Google Scholar
Pope, Daniel. The Making of Modern Advertising. New York, 1983.Google Scholar
Porter, Glenn, and Livesay, Harold C.. Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing. Baltimore, Md., 1971.Google Scholar
Post, Emily. Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, 11th ed. rev. New York, 1965.Google Scholar
Poster, Mark. Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges. New York, 1997.Google Scholar
Poster, Mark. ed. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Stanford, Calif., 2001.Google Scholar
Presbrey, Frank. The History and Development of Advertising. Garden City, N.Y., 1929.Google Scholar
Rae, Larry, and Sayer, Andrew, eds. Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn. London, 1999.Google Scholar
Robinson, Daniel. The Measure of Democracy: Polling, Market Research, and Public Life, 1930-1945. Toronto, 1999.Google Scholar
Rutherford, Paul. Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods. Toronto, 2000.Google Scholar
Scranton, Phillip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. Princeton, N.J., 1997.Google Scholar
Spears, Timothy B. 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture. New Haven, Conn., 1995.Google Scholar
Stallybrass, Peter, and White, Allon. Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y., 1986.Google Scholar
Stephenson, H. E., and McNaught, Carlton. The Story of Advertising in Canada: A Chronicle of Fifty Years. Toronto, 1939.Google Scholar
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York, 1989.Google Scholar
Stratton, Dorothy C., and Schleman, Helen B.. Your Best Foot Forward: Social Usage for Young Moderns. New York, 1940.Google Scholar
Tedlow, Richard. New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America. New York, 1990.Google Scholar
Thėriault, Thėrese. Visages de la Politesse. Montreal, 1961.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, N.Y, 1969.Google Scholar
Urquhart, M. C., and Buckley, K. A. H., eds. Historical Statistics of Canada. Toronto, 1965.Google Scholar
Vance, Jonathan F. Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War. Vancouver, 1997.Google Scholar
West, Nancy Martha. Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville, Va., 2000.Google Scholar
Wilkins, Mira. The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914. Cambridge, Mass., 1970.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, William Jr. William Wrigley, Jr.: The Man and His Business. Chicago, 1935.Google Scholar
Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate, 1870-1920. Chicago, 1990.Google Scholar

Articles and Essays

Church, Roy. “New Perspectives on the History of Products, Firms, Marketing, and Consumers in Britain and the United States since the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Economic History Review 52 (Aug. 1999): 405–35.Google Scholar
Church, Roy, and Clark, Christine. “Purposive Strategy or Serendipity? Development and Diversification in Three Consumer Product Companies, 1918-39: J. & J. Colman, Reckitt & Sons and Lever Bros./Unilever.” Business History 45 (Jan. 2003): 23–59.Google Scholar
Church, Roy, and Godley, Andrew. “The Emergence of Modern Marketing: International Dimensions.” Business History 45 (Jan. 2003): 1–5.Google Scholar
Clarke, Sally. “Consumer Negotiations.” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 101–22.Google Scholar
Clarke, Sally. “Managing Design: The Art and Colour Section at General Motors, 1927-1941.” Journal of Design History 12, no. 1 (1999): 65–79.Google Scholar
Gustaitis, Joseph. “The Sticky History of Chewing Gum.” American History 33 (Oct. 1998): 30-34, 69–71.Google Scholar
Harris, Kate W. “Kiss a Little Longer Campaign.” In Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns, ed. Thomas Riggs. Farmington, Mich., 2000, p. 1972.Google Scholar
Heller, Scott. “Race, Class, Gender, and Culture Are Now Part of Business History.” Chronicle of Higher Education (17 Oct. 1997): A15-16.Google Scholar
Hollingworth, H.L. “Psycho-Dynamics of Chewing.” Archives of Psychology 239 (July 1939): 5–89.Google Scholar
Koehn, Nancy F. “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century: Making Markets for Processed Foods.” Business History Review 73 (Autumn 1999): 349–93.Google Scholar
Lipartito, Kenneth. “Culture and the Practice of Business History.” Business and Economic History 24 (Winter 1995): 1–41.Google Scholar
Manko, Katina L. “Now You Are in Business for Yourself: The Independent Contractors of the California Perfume Company, 1886-1938.” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 5–26.Google Scholar
Nickles, Shelley. “More is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America.” American Quarterly 54 (Dec. 2002): 581–622.Google Scholar
Nickles, Shelley. “‘Preserving Women’: Refrigerator Design as Social Process in the 1930s.” Technology and Culture 43 (Oct. 2002): 693–727.Google Scholar
Prettyman, Gib. “Advertising, Utopia, and Commercial Idealism: The Case of King Gillette.” Prospects 24 (1999): 231–48.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Lloyd G. “Some Notes on the Distributive Trades in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 4 (Aug. 1938): 533-48.Google Scholar
Roberts, Mary Louise. “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture.” American Historical Review 103 (June 1998): 817–44.Google Scholar
Schatzberg, Eric. “Symbolic Culture and Technological Change: The Cultural History of Aluminum as an Industrial Material.” Enterprise & Society 4 (June 2003): 226–71.Google Scholar
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Davey Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian American.” Journal of Contemporary History 17 (April 1982): 325–50.Google Scholar
Stanger, Howard R. “From Factory to Family: The Creation of a Corporate Culture in the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York.” Business History Review 74 (Autumn 2002): 407–33.Google Scholar
Strasser, Susan. “Making Consumption Conspicuous: Transgressive Topics Go Mainstream.” Technology and Culture 43 (Oct. 2002): 755–70.Google Scholar
Tomes, Nancy. “Merchants of Health: Medicine and Consumer Culture in the United States, 1900-1940.” Journal of American History 88 (Sept. 2001): 519–48.Google Scholar
Walden, Keith. “Speaking Modern: Language, Culture and Hegemony in Grocery Window Display, 1887-1920.” Canadian Historical Review 70 (1989): 285–310.Google Scholar
Watts, Steven. “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century.” Journal of American History 82 (June 1995): 84–110.Google Scholar

Magazines, Newspapers, and Trade Publications

“American Cigarets and Chewing-Gum for the World’s Mouths.” Literary Digest (15 Dec. 1923), 72–73.Google Scholar
“Average American Chews 109 Sticks of Gum a Year.” Scientific American (Dec. 1931), 417–18.Google Scholar
Bell, Francis. “What Price Loyalty.” Canadian Magazine (Jan. 1932), 7, 21.Google Scholar
“Candy Consumption: Who Knows What It Is?” Marketing (28 Nov. 1925), 322.Google Scholar
“The Chewing Gum Industry.” Fortune Magazine (April 1932), 87–102.Google Scholar
Crowell, Merle. “The Wonder Story of Wrigley.” American Magazine (March 1920), 20–24.Google Scholar
“Fifty Years of Chewing.” Literary Digest (5 Aug. 1916), 322–24.Google Scholar
“Gum and Its Chewers.” Literary Digest (31 Jan. 1914), 202.Google Scholar
“Gum and the Graces.” Hygeia 6 (Oct. 1928): 571–2.Google Scholar
“Gum as a War Ration.” Literary Digest (17 Oct. 1914), 737–38.Google Scholar
Heinzl, John. “Chew on this: Dental Gums in Pitched Battle for Buyers.” Globe and Mail (10 Nov. 2000), M1.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Austin E. “The Story of Spearmint.” Economic Advertising 4 (May 1911): 21–22.Google Scholar
Lowrey, Harold C. “Thinking in Terms of Bigger Sales.” Marketing 12 (June 1918): 11.Google Scholar
“Medicated Chewing Gums.” Hygeia 4 (Dec. 1926): 709–10.Google Scholar
“Premiums Keep 75,000 Storekeepers Trying to Sell More Wrigley’s Gum.” Marketing (10 Aug. 1935), 4.Google Scholar
Rubinow, I. M. “Premiums in Retail Trade.” Journal of Political Economy 13 (Sept. 1905): 574–586.Google Scholar
Rukeyser, Merryle Stanley. “W. Wrigley Jr. Not in Paste Co.” New York Evening Journal, 5 Oct. 1925, 16.Google Scholar
Ting, Mark E. [Bertram Brooker]. “Hoist the Sales.” Marketing (15 March 1930), 152.Google Scholar
“William Wrigley Jr., American.” Fortune Magazine (April 1932), 85-86ff.Google Scholar

Government Publications

Canada Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Report on the Chewing Gum Industry in Canada, 1921 and 1922. Ottawa, 1924.Google Scholar
Ontario Ministry of Education. Manners. Toronto, 1914.Google Scholar

Archival Sources

Wrigley Canada Records, Toronto Corporate Headquarters.Google Scholar
J. Walter Thompson Papers, Duke University, Special Collections Library, Durham, N.C.Google Scholar
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Room, University of Toronto.Google Scholar