Business did not join the counterculture, it noticed it
Large companies were not part of the counterculture, and in 1967 most executives regarded long hair and communes with suspicion. What happened instead was that advertisers and manufacturers noticed a large, young, and increasingly distinctive group of consumers and tried to speak to it. The result was an uneasy relationship: many young people disliked commercialism, yet the styles they adopted were quickly copied and sold. Some of the changes in advertising predate 1967, and some of the sharpest examples come from 1968 and later.
The market was the baby boom
By the mid-1960s, the first members of the baby boomer generation were teenagers and young adults. They had more spending money than earlier generations of young people, and they were numerous. Marketers began to talk about a corporate youth market as something distinct from the household budget controlled by parents. Record labels, clothing makers, soft-drink companies and car makers all adjusted their plans around it.
This coincided with a change in how advertising was made. Agencies had often relied on loud, repetitive claims. In the late 1950s and 1960s a group of firms, sometimes described as the “creative revolution,” favoured wit, honesty about a product’s flaws and a more knowing tone.
Volkswagen and Think Small
The best-known example is Doyle Dane Bernbach’s work for Volkswagen. Its “Think Small” advertisement, from around 1959, ran against the habits of Detroit, where cars were advertised as bigger, longer and more powerful each year. The Beetle was small, plain and unchanged from year to year, and the copy said so with dry humour. A companion piece, “Lemon,” explained that a car had been rejected because of a minor flaw.
These advertisements were not aimed specifically at hippies, and Volkswagen’s buyers were broad. But the brand’s modest, anti-status image fit people who disliked tail fins and annual model changes, and the Beetle and the Microbus later became associated with the counterculture. Critics have pointed out that the approach was itself a sales technique: honesty and self-mockery were used to win trust.
The Pepsi Generation
Pepsi-Cola went a different route. From 1963 its campaign addressed “the Pepsi Generation,” which was defined less by age than by attitude. Advertisements showed young, active, smiling people and suggested that choosing Pepsi was a way of belonging to the new and modern rather than the old. Coca-Cola was cast, by implication, as the drink of the previous generation. The campaign was not about rebellion, but it showed that a brand could sell a sense of generational identity.
Other firms followed. Dodge ran a “Dodge Rebellion” campaign in the mid-1960s, using the language of revolt to sell cars to younger buyers, and it was not the only company to borrow the vocabulary of rebellion.
Selling the look
As the hippie style became visible, clothing makers and retailers took it up. Bell-bottoms, bright prints, beads and fringe appeared in stores, and the mod fashion coming from London had already made shopping for youth clothing a mainstream habit. Boutiques turned out styles that were first assembled from thrift stores. By summer 1967, newspaper and magazine features had drawn attention to the Haight, and department stores and manufacturers were already producing versions of the look.
Music did the same. Record companies signed rock bands from San Francisco and elsewhere, and the album, rather than the single, became the focus of sales to young listeners.
The critique: rebellion as a product
Many contemporaries saw a contradiction. A subculture that rejected consumer culture was being turned into a market segment. The historian Thomas Frank, in The Conquest of Cool (1997), argued that business culture had itself been changing, and that advertising took up the language of rebellion partly because it already suited the industry’s own aims. Not all historians accept that account, and others emphasise how much the counterculture also wanted to buy and sell, with its own shops, posters and record labels.
A French theorist, Guy Debord, made a related point in the Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967: that images and commodities had come to mediate social life. It was not a book about hippies, but its ideas were later applied to episodes like this.
One of the best-known counterculture campaigns came in 1968, when Columbia Records advertised its rock releases with the slogan “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.” That is a 1968 example, and it is often cited as an illustration of the point.
What changed for business
Business learned several lasting lessons. Young people were a distinct market, authenticity could be marketed, and identification with a style or attitude could sell products as effectively as a list of features. The 1967 wave of nonconformity did not remake corporations, and most large firms stayed conservative in their internal culture. But the habit of presenting a product as a gesture of independence has remained a feature of advertising ever since.