ISSN 1025-3866 print/ISSN 1477-223X online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1025386032000168294 Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2003 VOL. 6(4), pp. 231–249 *Department of Organizational and Political Communication, Emerson College, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116, USA. Tel.: + 1 617 375-0653. E-mail: Samuel_Binkley@emerson.edu Cosmic Profit: Countercultural Commerce and the Problem of Trust in American Marketing SAM BINKLEY* This article offers an historical thesis on the demise of impersonal mass marketing and its replacement by personal niche or lifestyle marketing. Two parallel discussions are examined on the moral possibilities of marketing: one within the mainstream marketing establishment and the other among a countercultural network of small businesses. On a macro-theoretical level, theories of moral identity (derived from Anthony Giddens) are used to describe the anxieties provoked by a popular failure of trust in mass marketing generally, and the significance of lifestyles in refurbishing this trust. On a cultural–historical level, the dialogue between mainstream and countercultural businesses reveals how these anxieties were addressed through lifestyles meant to affirm trust and intimacy between marketers and consumers. An analysis of the intellectual synergy between countercultures and mainstream marketers suggests an alternative to the standard understanding of cooptation. Keywords: Counterculture; 1970s; Marketing; Anthony Giddens; Lifestyles; Trust The last quarter of a century has seen radical changes in the nature of marketing and consumption. The days of bundling consumers into masses based on rigid demographic categories have given way to more nuanced, customized and personalized appeals to precise market niches or lifestyle categories (Frank 1997; Leiss et al. 1990; Turow 1997; Firat and Dholakia 1998). While explanations for these changes vary, it is often assumed that the cause had something to do with the ascendance of a high profile lifestyle vanguard in the 1960s and 1970s. The hippies and counterculturals whose public romances with naturalism and authenticity transfixed the American media from the sidelines inspired advertisers with new ideas for the linking of products to more generally defined ways of living (Lasch 1978; Martin 1981; Clecack 1983). When using the usual demographic measures of gender, income, race and ethnicity counterculturals were indistinguishable from their traditional middle-class parents. However, they presented a puzzle for market researchers as they were worlds apart in the way they lived and the way they saw their lives expressed through purchases (Turow 1997: 37–54). Their preoccupation with personal authenticity in everyday lifestyle choices, and truthfulness in product and marketing messages, expressed their view of life as an ongoing project of authentic self-realization. Learning through experience, manifest in the present moment of lived experience rather than through indirect moral affiliations: “there’s more self awareness now” one researcher wrote “they [make] decisions for now” (Sommer 1976: 34).