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This essay examines how the American marketing consultant Estelle Ellis constructed both consumer markets as well as her own marketing expertise for  Seventeen  magazine (1945–1950),  Charm  magazine (1950–1958), and later, at her own marketing consultancy Business Image, Inc. (1958–1990), Condé Nast’s  Vogue . It argues that figures like Ellis can help us see the material role marketing consultants play in shaping political and media discourse. It examines how Ellis staged market-based interpretations of political categories for her merchandiser clients, translating political power into commercial value and, in the process, redefining categories like “feminist” upon her own lucrative terms. It follows two interrelated marketing tools that Ellis used in her work: audience construction strategies and self-branding practices. My reading of Ellis’ career offers up one example of how audiences become bound up with the marketers who construct them. Through this example, I reveal how this strategy works to authenticate the consumer as real; embed them within specific gendered and racialized categories; and sanitize them of any political associations that might exist in tension with a client’s—or the marketer’s—needs.

“How marketing consultants commodify social movements: Estelle Ellis, audience construction, and the women’s media market, 1945-1973”