Search results

The purpose of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive examination of the early cannabis-based food products industry, using Sweden as a case study. Drawing upon historical newspaper articles and advertisements from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive, the authors trace the short-lived development of the industry, from the initial exploitation of fears of tuberculosis in the late 19th century, followed by the “boom” in hempseed extract products and the widening of its claimed effects and, finally, increased skepticism and critiques of such products across the popular press in the early 20th century.

A rigorous search of the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive was conducted to gather newspaper articles and advertisements on cannabis-based foods. The collected resources were scrutinized using critical discourse analysis to tease out key discourses at work, particularly around the concepts of health, nutrition and science.

The authors find that central to the marketization of cannabis-based foods was the construction of disease based on scientific and medical discourse, fearmongering to create a strong consumer base and individualization to place responsibility on consumers to take action to protect their family’s health. This demonstrates not only the long historical relationship between science and food marketing but also how brands’ health claims could often be fraudulent or overstated.

It is important to cast a historical lens on the commercialization of cannabis-based food products because demand for similar types of products has rapidly grown over the past decade. Now, just as before, manufacturers tap into consumers’ insecurities about health, and many of the same questions continue to be mooted about products’ safety. Paying greater attention to the broader and problematic history of commercial cannabis can, thus, serve as a reminder for both consumers and policymakers to think twice about whether hemp really is for health and if the claims it espouses are a mirage rather than a miracle.

By studying the marketing of advertising space, this paper aims to study how class, gender and region were portrayed in terms of economic considerations in adverts selling advertising space to potential advertisers. The paper studies how readers were discursively transformed into consumers in this material and how different consumer groups were depicted, divided and framed during Sweden’s early consumer culture. By doing so, the paper highlights the tensions between aiming at a mass audience, on the one hand, and striving to reach more and more specific consumer groups on the other hand.

Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are made in order to follow the changes of highlighted consumer groups in the ads. Intersectional analysis is used to see how notions of class and gender intersected during the analysed period.

The sectioning of the press is in the paper stressed as a prerequisite for market segmentation and the economic history of mass media is lifted as essential for understanding it. The gendering and classing of market segments were also based on how common interests were interpreted by political movements and their press forums. For surviving in the long run, however, the paper argues that the political press needed to commercialise their readerships to attract advertisers and survive economically.

The paper concludes that mass marketing and segmentation processes were in many senses parallel in the studied material. Statements of reaching all social classes diminished over time, but notions of the masses were prevalent in both the worker and the women categories. However, how advertisers choose between different media for their advertising campaigns or how they adopted different marketing methods towards different segments are beyond the scope of this paper.