Tupperware : the promise of plastic in 1950’s America
Alison J. Clarke Smithsonian Institution Press 1999

We hold this truth to be self-evident. The best question to keep asking yourself in marketing is : What is our market? With this product, what are we actually selling? If you are in the petrol business, you are clearly not selling an inflammable liquid with an interesting mix of paraffins and olefins that makes cars run. And if you think you are, you should immediately be transferred out of the marketing department and into refinery security or pensions or Antarctic exploration. Yes, as we know, petrol sells on a promise of psychological escape through travel; or on the organised, reassuring availability of the brand; or on the eco-credentials of the parent company; or on the driver’s appetite for risk-avoidance when buying things in an unfamiliar place. Or maybe something else….

The trouble with this truth is that any product’s best meaning is not static; the marketing intelligence has to continue to re-define any brand’s "fit" in the context of the interactive dynamics of socio-economic change and the doings - in response to exactly the same proposition - of competitors. The social / cultural / economic value of petrol in the 1950’s was not, QED, what it is today. The pursuit of creative irreducibility : paring down the brand’s meaning to the point where the emerging definition comes closest to the consumer’s spirit is the marketer’s true day-job. What are we really selling here - and selling here-and-now?

The history of Tupperware, as offered in Ms. Clarke’s dazzling book, is a perfect example of this theme at work. The Promise of Plastic is a thinking marketer’s handbook. Consider this selection :-

"…Tupperware expressed an evolutionary logic whereby market economics and technological progress combined to create an ideal aesthetic and functional form for mass consumption…

…The authenticity and integrity of the Tupperware modernist project seemed uncomfortably compromised by the gendered sociality and quirkiness of the Tupperware party, with its appeal to consumption as a social rather than rational practice…

…despite claims to the contrary , rational functionality and utility were by no means the sole determinants of Tupperware’s immense commercial success". (Emphasis added).

These days, many will probably look back on the golden age of Tupperware - those, that is, who can remember any of it - as something seriously ludicrous. All those sales parties in someone’s living-room; plastic jam jars and coloured egg whisks; free gifts and sales lists…. It sounds ghastly. But this whole story is the marketing theoretician’s paradise. In one obvious sense, the product had one set of purposes and the brand - almost literally a plastic awning under which women could gather - another. For many involved, the service actually supplied lay in the social possibilities of the product’s means of distribution. Taking into account the social and economic context of 1950’s America - with feminism still but a strange itch in the foundation garments of hometown suburbia - this is surely a beautiful, beautiful idea. The tupperware event sold a kind of organised female solidarity, an exclusion of men that was empowering in itself and, for some, embryonic economic independence. This was not merely catching the spirit of the times - this was pinning it to the floor and extorting money from it.

And for its thousands of casual female distributors, Tupperware spoke to a pent-up ache to achieve some kind of personal success. It all seems almost alien, tawdry and cult-like now, but just think of all the tupperware culture must have grown to mean in people’s lives :-

"The Tupperware College of Knowledge, which provided a curriculum of sales advice, offered a form of certificated qualification to a social class otherwise precluded. At the close of the Jubilee celebrations a graduation ceremony, incorporating soft, stirring choral music and candlelight, acknowledged women of all ages in a formal commemoration of their achievements….The playing of the national anthem signaled the close of the emotional ceremony".

The Promise of Plastic is a mentally thrilling piece of work. On one level it is a corporate biography of Earl Tupper himself and Brownie Wise ("a middle-aged, divorced mother from Detroit") who invented a product sales and distribution system that was more revolutionary than even she could have appreciated. On another level, this is a very engaging, almost post-marxist, discourse on the social purpose of consumption of any kind. But in a way, we are not sure this should have been a book at all. This should be a case study for business school programmes. There are just so many first and second principles at work in this story.

We wonder, moreover, is the Internet like tupperware? Is the new technology following the same path-to-success as the old by finding - inadvertently or otherwise - connections with the rhythms and the contours of women’s lives? This thought ran with us like a dream as we read this terrific book. Plastic too was once a mass medium and, as such, it became, qua tupperware, destructive of stereotypes and dysfunctional assumptions about the role of women. The technology let women be different versions of themselves.

The photographs here are brilliantly chosen and brilliantly revealing. And the text just drips with insight for the thinking marketer. Yummy, yummy, yummy!