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Introduction
Lifestyle marketing – an approach where a brand associates itself with the values, interests and desires of a specific target audience – is often framed as a postmodern phenomenon that emerged in response to transformations in consumer culture, cultural identities and the growing aestheticisation of our everyday lives (Saviolo and Marazza, 2013). For many scholars, a “big bang” moment occurred in the 1980s when consumers began to display their individuality through products and goods, thereby turning lifestyle into a “life project” (Featherstone, 1987; Chaney, 2001; Warde, 2002; Bocock, 2003; Trentmann, 2004). This was considered to mark a radical break with the mass consumption practices of the 1950s. However, this preoccupation with the novelty of lifestyle marketing has tended to obscure its broader historical trajectory and overlooked the fact that this practice actually emerged in the late 19th century in response to rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, which led to the formation of a new middle class and the birth of modern advertising and consumerism (Richards, 1990; Mort, 2000; Bell and Hollows, 2006).
In recent years, both historians and media and communication scholars have attempted to reappraise the concept of lifestyle marketing by placing the phenomenon within a broader history of patterned practices and uses. Studies have been conducted on the use of the lifestyle marketing to sell everything from chocolate (French, 2017), protein-enhanced foods (O’Hagan, 2021) and newspapers (Piggott, 2021) to pianos (Carnevali and Newton, 2013), dip pens (O’Hagan, 2018) and cosmetics (Schweitzer, 2004), to name but a few examples. Obtaining a greater appreciation of the historical development of lifestyle marketing is important because it challenges the assumption that brands of everyday products have only used lifestyle marketing in the past 30 years (Michman et al., 2003). Furthermore, it enhances our understanding of modern approaches to marketing and the potential problems surrounding it, as well as offering consumers a space to reflect more critically on lifestyle claims put forward today in ways that they may struggle to do so when being too temporarily close to them. To date, however, the vast majority of historical studies into lifestyle marketing (such as those cited above) have focused on a British or US context, thereby providing a one-dimensional and Anglocentric understanding of the topic that risks overstating...