ABSTRACT
In order to appreciate the special significance of the branding of New York in the 1970s, it is first important to examine the broader social forces which shaped this approach, and which this approach in turn helped to transform. To do so, I will devote this introductory chapter to a theoretical and historical exploration of the interplay between media, marketing, and visual culture, on the one hand, and capitalist urbanization, on the other. First I will trace the rise of commercial media in the modern industrial city, looking in particular at the role of urban boosterism in the nineteenth century, and the growth in tourism marketing in the wake of World War II. Next, I will examine how the 1970s era of deindustrialization, fiscal crisis, and deregulation provoked the rejection of New Deal-style civic liberalism at the local and national scales, and the rise of a neoliberal, free market ideology in its place, as well as the intensification of market-based competition between cities and regions. As I will explore in the following section, this shift led most cities to turn to a new, entrepreneurial mode of economic development that combined political and economic restructuring with cultural strategies like image marketing. Because this approach was itself modeled on the private sector, I will then analyze the original development of market research and “branding” in corporate restructuring more generally in the same time period.
