Consumer Engineering by Belgian Consumer Movements: From Modern Marketing with a Transnational Touch to Late-Modern Insecurities, 1957–2000

Abstract

This chapter outlines the historical conditions under which a technocratic, commodified version of consumer activism arose in postwar Belgium. It also traces how these consumer movements have used consumer tests to engineer—or anticipate—consumer preferences for their own institutional survival. When comparative testing organizations faced challenges during the eighties and nineties, however, it turned out that their market value was essentially related to social and historical forces more than any intrinsic value of their “product.” It became clear that a social movement for consumers could not simply be reduced to a product, even if it relied on some of the established corporate recipes to survive.