The earliest advertisements took the form of notices about books, theatres, lotteries, wigs, medical remedies, and servants, as well as guidance about property, ships, coaches, schools and charities. There was a growing volume of the lost and found type of advertisement, which, to judge from the papyri in the Cairo museum, is among the most ancient of all forms of public announcements.Read more at location 906
Dr Johnson could write in 1759 that ‘advertisements are now so very numerous that they are very negligently perused’Read more at location 912
If the manufacturer were to keep his factory running so as to make the best use of his specialised men and machines, he was driven to tap wider circles of custom and maintain a regular flow of trade outwards to ever more distant markets.Read more at location 922
Because these costs of marketing often increase rapidly as the scale of output expands, some critics have argued that they represent a wasteful dissipation of the economies reaped in production.Read more at location 926
Marshall conceded that there might be too many traders (as there might be too many workers employed in a factory), but he suggested that, instead of reviving mediaeval attacks on trade, writers should attack ‘the imperfect organisation of trade, particularly of retail trade’.Read more at location 931
Distribution costs must therefore offset, in some degree, the economies reaped by mass production.Read more at location 938
From higher wages, families had money to spare for other than basic physical necessities, and during the second half of the nineteenth century a growing number of new products began competing for a place in the mass market. Processed foods such as condensed milk, cocoa, meat extracts and margarine appeared alongside chocolates and sweets marked with the name of national suppliers such as Cadbury, Fry and Maynard.Read more at location 958
To win access to the developing mass market, manufacturers could establish their own outlets for selling directly to the public, set up their own wholesaling organisation, or alternatively they could advertise over the heads of retailer and wholesaler in the effort to stimulate public demand for their goodsRead more at location 965
Examples of the first method during the closing decades of the century were seen in chemists’ goods (Boot’s, Timothy White’s), groceries (Lipton’s, Home & Colonial, Maypole, Pearks), sweets (Maynard’s), footwear (Freeman, Hardy & Willis) and in beer with the extension of tied houses.Read more at location 967
The alternative method of marketing products by mass advertising had long been pioneered by suppliers of proprietary medicines;Read more at location 971
When, in 1712, a tax of one shilling was imposed on published advertisements, the politicians were deliberately aiming to curb the growth of an independent press. The fact that this was swiftly followed by many failures, including that of The Spectator, proves that, despite limited circulation and high prices, papers had already come to rely upon advertising as a source of revenue.Read more at location 978
of the nine daily papers circulating in London five were ‘primarily advertising sheets’ whilst the remainder devoted at least half their space to advertising.Read more at location 981
When The Times was established in 1785 it relied, like most other serious papers of the period, upon a direct subsidy from the politicians.Read more at location 983
‘the daily press would never have come into existence as a force in public and social life if it had not been for the need of men of commerce to advertise. Only through the growth of advertising did the press achieve independence’.Read more at location 985
Shortly afterwards, the stamp duty and paper tax were also swept away, and the 640 papers of 1855 grew to above 3,000 by the end of the century. Prices dropped, circulations moved steadily upwards, and new papers were launched, starting in the 1850s with the Daily News and the Daily Telegraph, both sold for the unheard of price of one penny.Read more at location 989
in 1896 Alfred Harmsworth started the Daily Mail, which sold at a half-penny and achieved a sale verging on one million, four years later.Read more at location 994
Because advertising was the chief source of revenue for the cheap press, the bid for circulation took the form of competitions, prizes, gifts and every kind of promotion,Read more at location 996
It was the development of a national network for press and poster advertising that enabled manufacturers to launch their branded products into widening markets. This has led some economists to blame advertising for ‘product differentiation’Read more at location 1005
The ideal of a perfect market with a homogeneous product traded by numerous suppliers none of which could get more than the ruling price was contrasted with an ‘imperfect’ market broken up into spheres of influence, each dominated by a large-scale producer selling an exclusive brand at an allegedly arbitrary price.Read more at location 1007
it is not true that an orderly and efficient system of competition had prevailed before the advent of mass advertising. Even when trade was still confined to simple agricultural produce, difficulties of transport and communication prevented the establishment of wide, open markets in which a single price ruled for uniform products, irrespective of the particular supplier.Read more at location 1012
From the days of mediaeval guilds, craftsmen made a practice of fixing their name or mark to their own product, as much from a feeling of pride as from the acceptance of responsibility to the purchaser.Read more at location 1017
As the distance between producer and consumer widened, the brand-name (or some other evidence of origin) provided a convenient bridge between them. For the producer it was a way of building up goodwill and establishing a more dependable market for the products of his fixed plant and equipment. For customers, the brand enabled them to buy again those things which had previously given satisfaction as well as to avoid wasting more money on those which did not.Read more at location 1019
branding is essentially a grading device which helps the public to identify a particular product and to associate it with an expected quality,Read more at location 1022
We have seen that the early shops had sprung up to cater primarily for the convenience of the monied minority. Their pace was leisurely; elaborate service was the essence of their personal relationship and customers were charged accordingly.Read more at location 1026
Note: LE PRIME DIFF ERANO SOLO X I RICCHI. BENI DI LUSSO. LANPUBNLICITÀ DI MASSA LE ALLARGHERÀ AL POPOLO Edit
It was neither the shopkeepers themselves nor even the advertisers who started the movement towards more efficient methods of retailing which spread swiftly during the later decades of the last century. As Mr Basil Yamey (1954a,b) has pointed out, the initiative came from new classes of customers, seeking better outlets for their growing purchasing power. More enterprising retailers were quick to take advantage of wider public demand for less elaborate service and keener prices.Read more at location 1030
in Mr Yamey’s judgement: ‘By the end of the century the department stores, multiples and vigorous small or medium scale private traders had displaced the co-operative societies as the pacemakers of change and of competition in the retail trades.’Read more at location 1035
This streamlining of retail trade was helped by the spread of advertised, branded and packaged merchandise which not only speeded the turnover of stocks but also made for easier handling by less skilled shop assistants, so that grocers, for example, could sell cigarettes, confectionery and patent medicines.Read more at location 1037
Inevitably there were protests from traders’ associations against this disturbing trend towards what amounted to pre-selling goodsRead more at location 1039
lower prices to compensate for less service.Read more at location 1042
Prominent amongst the companies which, before 1914, were described as having been ‘built by advertising’ were medicine vendors and soap makers. Health and cleanliness could be sold to everyone, and, while low unit prices carried these products within reach of the mass market, repeat sales in millions of homes brought large profits which afforded the resources for lavish advertising campaigns.Read more at location 1052
only the ignorant (or ill) could have regarded many of the claims as other than frivolous and fanciful.Read more at location 1057
Punch wrote: ‘it will mend the legs of men and tables equally well and will be found an excellent article for frying fish in’.Read more at location 1058
A barely literate public was expected to be on its guard against false pretences; caveat emptor was the ruling doctrine and the customer might secure redress in the courts only when an advertiser was so incautious as to go beyond vague promises and offer a ‘guarantee’ which lawyers might accept as a part of the contract of sale.Read more at location 1061
It was the British Medical Association which provoked a government enquiry into such abuses and led to the establishment of voluntary and legislative checks.Read more at location 1064
The fourfold increase in the sale of soap during the fifty years following the repeal of the duty in 1853 owed a great deal to W. H. Lever (the first Lord Leverhulme), who graduated from his father’s grocery business in Lancashire to become the leading manufacturer of soap in Britain.Read more at location 1065
The very success of these companies attracted a multitude of small producers who found that soap of a sort could be made quite simply and supplied in anonymous yellow barsRead more at location 1068
Such competition drove the leading companies to use fiercer methods of promotion and more aggressive advertising,Read more at location 1070
encourage ‘brand loyalty’, offered prizes based on the collection of wrappers.Read more at location 1072
as a result, soap was transformed in quality and greatly reduced in price.Read more at location 1074
the really spectacular period of cigarette advertising occurred in 1901, when a concerted attack on the British market was threatened by the American Tobacco Company.Read more at location 1076
Godfrey Phillips, having been refused all eight pages of a London paper in return for ‘a fabulous sum’, made do with four pages which he used to attack foreign goods (especially those of ‘Yankee trusts’) and urge the public to buy its own British cigarettes (then selling at five for one penny).Read more at location 1078
Stability came in December when the Imperial Tobacco Company was formed by a dozen rival firms which retained a large measure of autonomy in marketing their separate brands.Read more at location 1080
Consumer durables provided early proof of the serious use of advertising in building up demand for such new products as sewing machines, typewriters, cameras, bicycles and motor cars.Read more at location 1081
When in 1905 Ingersoll advertised his five-shilling watch, jewellers were not enthusiastic about stocking such a cheap line until advertising began to tap fresh layers of customers.Read more at location 1083
When, in 1905, Gillette brought his first safety razor to Britain it cost one guinea.Read more at location 1084
Advertising, employed to overcome public prejudice against all such novelties, had the effect of extending sales, stimulating competition and reducing prices.Read more at location 1084
advertisements that were ‘crude, meretricious, vulgar and dishonest’.Read more at location 1095
training, qualifications and codes of conduct were unheard of; advertisers lacked experience, and every phase of their business lacked method and measurement; and just as the claims made in advertisements lacked moderation, their presentation lacked artistry.Read more at location 1099
advertisements relied for their attraction on tricks and sensationalism.Read more at location 1102
Neither data nor statistical tools existed to measure press circulation, readership, buying habits, market penetration and other records of systematic selling.Read more at location 1104
Whatever today’s critics may think about the prevalence of false and misleading advertisements, there can be no doubt that standards have improved enormously.Read more at location 1112
Whatever further improvements may be possible by these and other methods, those who appreciate the almost limitless extent and diversity of advertising in a free society will also understand that its regulation – without undue encroachment upon individual liberty and responsibility – poses a constant challenge to all the interests concerned.Read more at location 1113
From the field of literature, Agatha Christie, J. B. Priestley and W. H. Auden have written copy for advertisers, as Lamb and Byron are reputed to have done.Read more at location 1120
