Paper Title
Fashioning a Marketing Magnet: Tillie Lewis and the Tillie Lewis Food Company, 1940s-1970s
Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, gender, labor/business
Abstract
Tillie Lewis was among the first to can American-grown pomodoros, the Italian tomato preferred for sauce and paste, establishing a canning empire at the heart of the Great Central Valley of California. Founded in 1934, her Stockton, California canning company grew quickly and ultimately offered canned vegetables, fruits, pastas and meats, as well as the nation’s first line of diet foods utilizing saccharin. By 1966, Tillie Lewis Foods had become a multi-million dollar company and was purchased by the Ogden Corporation which appointed Tillie Lewis the first female member of the Board of Directors. She appeared in many press accounts, perhaps most notably in Fortune magazine’s April 1973 feature on “The Ten Highest-Ranking Women in Big Business.”
Lewis’ rise to fame and fortune as company founder was both a carefully orchestrated marketing outcome and a key publicity trope. Lewis was both the marketer and the marketed in the company’s promotions. Tracing change over time shows the ways in which Lewis was increasingly the core identity for her company’s brands. Moving from central, to center, to core in product branding between the 1940s and 1960s, Lewis was the magnet the company used to draw consumers. Her popular image, carefully constructed for the public eye, may have been self-aggrandizing but it was also clearly strategic because it catapulted Lewis and her company to the top of the business world—in an industry filled with female consumers but dominated by men.
Keywords
women, business, marketing, gender, food
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Download
Fashioning a Marketing Magnet: Tillie Lewis and the Tillie Lewis Food Company, 1940s-1970s
Tillie Lewis was among the first to can American-grown pomodoros, the Italian tomato preferred for sauce and paste, establishing a canning empire at the heart of the Great Central Valley of California. Founded in 1934, her Stockton, California canning company grew quickly and ultimately offered canned vegetables, fruits, pastas and meats, as well as the nation’s first line of diet foods utilizing saccharin. By 1966, Tillie Lewis Foods had become a multi-million dollar company and was purchased by the Ogden Corporation which appointed Tillie Lewis the first female member of the Board of Directors. She appeared in many press accounts, perhaps most notably in Fortune magazine’s April 1973 feature on “The Ten Highest-Ranking Women in Big Business.”
Lewis’ rise to fame and fortune as company founder was both a carefully orchestrated marketing outcome and a key publicity trope. Lewis was both the marketer and the marketed in the company’s promotions. Tracing change over time shows the ways in which Lewis was increasingly the core identity for her company’s brands. Moving from central, to center, to core in product branding between the 1940s and 1960s, Lewis was the magnet the company used to draw consumers. Her popular image, carefully constructed for the public eye, may have been self-aggrandizing but it was also clearly strategic because it catapulted Lewis and her company to the top of the business world—in an industry filled with female consumers but dominated by men.