Niklas Olsen: “The Invention of the Ecological Consumer: A New History of Green Capitalism”

ABSTRACT:

This talk reconstructs the early history of the ‘ecological consumer’ as a business sustainability strategy, tracing its origins to U.S. marketing research in the early 1970s. It situates this development within broader trajectories of corporate responses to environmentalism and shifts in the environmental movement toward market-based solutions. Drawing on trade press, academic debates, and conference proceedings, the article shows how marketers recast ecological critique as consumer preference and market segmentation, positioning the ecological consumer as a scientific category and sales target. In doing so, they reframed corporate narratives from resisting environmentalism to viewing it as a profitable opportunity. The article offers a cultural and ideological history of this formative moment in green capitalism, revealing overlooked actors, contexts, and ideas that laid the foundations for its breakthrough in the 1980s. It traces how these developments contributed to the emergence of a ‘new green spirit of capitalism’ linking profitability with environmental improvement.