Tracking the culture of consumption: Curtis Publishing Company, Charles Coolidge Parlin, and the origins of market research, 1911-1930

This dissertation examines the emergence of the Division of Commercial Research at Curtis Publishing Company from 1910 to 1930. Drawing primarily from the Curtis Publishing Company papers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Curtis Archives in Indianapolis, it looks at how a hunger for information about product distribution, business competition and magazine audiences gave rise to market research and readership research during the transition of American society from a producer to a consumer culture. The Division of Commercial Research was designed to provide much-needed credibility for advertising. Through the analytical justifications of Curtis' policies and philosophies by Charles Coolidge Parlin, the company's first director of research, Commercial Research became the platform on which Curtis stood as it boosted itself into prominence. The division analyzed the inner workings of key industries, and it provided a map, of sorts, of the emerging consumer culture. It also helped Curtis position its magazines as publications that reached the elite of American society--primarily native-born whites with money to spend on consumer goods.;As it explores the development of market research, this dissertation makes an important step toward understanding how Curtis' Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal and Country Gentleman came to dominate the mass-magazine market of the early twentieth century. In providing the fullest account to date of Curtis' business strategies and philosophies, it shows that the company's success was not built solely on the strength and planning of its editorial products. It explains how the company used research to provide feedback about magazine audiences, to position itself among a growing number of publications, to carefully map the spread and growth of a consumer culture, and to reinforce its authority among businesses that advertised in Curtis magazines. This study challenges assumptions on which previous historians have based their work, asserting that Curtis Publishing, into the 1920s, should be seen as a force as important as advertising agencies in the development of American advertising and the creation and development of a consumer society.