What Your Consumer Wants

Abstract

With what mechanisms and cultural resources do market actors pursue change? Based on an analysis of business-to-business advertisements in two US food industry trade publications, we show the generative influence of social movements on perceived market opportunities. Building on recent scholarship on market-making, we find that market actors articulate and reshape critiques of their own industry by making claims about what consumers ostensibly want and about how their products can satisfy those desires. We find that business-to-business food ingredient advertisements selectively articulate precepts of the emergent ‘good food’ movement by urging manufacturers to develop healthy, natural, and ‘clean’ foods. While ‘good food’ advocates typically portray processed and packaged food as inherently unhealthy, suppliers and trade associations' advertisements transform this critique by claiming that products will be more marketable to consumers if they are made with ingredients designed to provide specific health benefits and to comply with federally mandated product labeling regulations. As such, we find that these business-to-business advertisements mediate between imagined demands and pragmatic constraints while serving as a conduit for the influence of social movements on industry practices and products.