ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how youth marketing in the age of affluence initiated a strategy of focusing on youth subculture as a way of targeting young people's consumption and as a way of appealing to the ever expanding youth market. Marketing aims to associate its brands with certain styles of life, so that the lifestyles can be assumed when purchasing its products. 'The New Left' history that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s moved away from a study of history that focused exclusively on elites to a new social history that focused on ordinary people. Improvements in market research in the 1970s and in advertising practices in the 1980s would help marketers to understand subculture more effectively and firmly establish the template for selling to youth that was established in the 1960s. In the popular press and in the popular imagination teenagers were the youth subculture. Affluence in the post-war period has had a distinct impact on young people in Britain.
