Wednesday, June 17, 2020

James P. Woodard's "Brazil's Revolution in Commerce"

James P. Woodard, professor of history at Montclair State University, is the author of A Place in Politics: São Paulo, Brazil, from Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Brazil's Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century, and reported the following:
Flipping through the early chapters of my book with some anticipation, I found the top of page 99 to be a letdown. For the crucial page opens midway through a paragraph describing techniques used by the media- and market-research firm Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics, known universally in Brazil as IBOPE, pronounced ee-bop), founded in 1942 by a Brazilian admirer of George Gallup. These are important details, to be sure, but it is hardly the most exciting passage in the book.

Description of IBOPE’s techniques continues through the next two paragraphs, toward the end of the second of which one finds its scheme for ranking the neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro by the socioeconomic class of their households, using the letters A, B, and C; A denoting the toniest neighborhoods, C the least chic. Now we’re getting somewhere—I thought to myself as my eyes worked their way down the page—for as the next paragraph indicates, the classification of household socioeconomic standing using the letters A, B, and C was something that IBOPE had borrowed from the J. Walter Thompson Company, which had developed the system in the United States before bringing to Brazil in 1929, when the powerful New York–based advertising agency opened its first Brazilian office. By time IBOPE’s operations were in full swing, in the mid-1940s, the A, B, C scheme had reached much wider use in Brazil than it ever did in the United States. And it is there that page 99 ends, in another incomplete paragraph.

If any readers persevered through the discussion of “coincidental radio checking” techniques and reached this discussion of the origins and diffusion of a letter-denominated system of social classification, they would have—knowingly or not—arrived at something that is at once one of the “hooks” to the project, as well as evidence of its central thrust. For it follows up on where the book begins:

A classe C vai ao paraíso!
(Class C goes to paradise!)
These words were everywhere in Brazil as the first decade of the twentieth-first century ended. They indicated that, for the first time in the country’s history, its working poor (class C) had arrived and become full participants in its consumer capitalism—its world of getting and spending, of more—built up over the preceding decades by firms the likes of J. Walter Thompson and IBOPE, amid encounters between the United States and Brazil in which Brazilians were the most crucial actors. Along the way, their country and its culture were remade, to the extent that the dominant way of discussing social difference in Brazil today is an artifact of interwar Madison Avenue. That remaking—the cumulative work of decades—is the subject of every one of the pages of Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce. Along the way, readers will even find that the book hazards an explanation for why the A, B, C system caught on in Brazil (today it is ubiquitous, used even by the Brazilian equivalent of the Census Bureau), whereas in the United States it fell into disuse even in advertising circles, never having made any broader cultural impact. But that explanation begins 189 pages after the page we began with today...
Learn more about Brazil's Revolution in Commerce at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue