Advertising A New Approach (RLE Advertising)

Walter Taplin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136666292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Walter Taplin here presents the first fruits of his exhaustive enquiry into the causes of this massive feature of contemporary life. Advertising has deeper and more interesting sources than the mere desire of manufacturers to secure markets, or of high-pressure salesmen to secure commissions. Taplin explores the nature of human wants, examines the functions and limitations of information, and distinguishes the good from the bad in the arts of persuasion. His approach to the subject is indeed a new one, and of the greatest value to all who wish to understand one of the most powerful forces of the day.

First published in 1960.

I

Introduction

 

ADVERTISING, because it is ubiquitous and obtrusive, is a subject on which everyone tends to form strong opinions. This is an encouragement to the serious investigator of the nature of the phenomenon and at the same time it is something of a barrier in his path. It means that everyone is interested in the subject, but nobody is quite disinterested. Investigation itself, the search for the truth, soon begins to turn up ideas and facts, but these are at once seized upon by partisans who regard them as potential evidence to support their preconceived opinions.

The investigator does not escape from this difficulty by addressing himself particularly to educated and thinking people, since these are even more likely than the rest to have arrived at strong views on the subject of advertising. Generally speaking, those who are positively interested in the subject fall into two groups—those who dislike advertising and those who have a commercial stake in it. It is next to impossible to make statements which are accepted by both sides at once. The mere prober of ideas and producer of facts is liable to be ground, with the results of his studies, between the upper and the nether millstones.

This risk will have to be taken. An attempt is made here to describe what advertising is and what advertisers are trying to do. If we may begin with a broad division of the subject, into the causes of advertising on the one hand and its effects on the other, then it may be said that this book is mainly concerned with causes. The effects, in their broadest social aspects, are for all to see. Anyone is free to form and state opinions about them. The more narrowly economic effects of advertising are less easy to observe and assess, though several economists have tried and some are still trying. The fact that very few significant and sure statements can yet be made about the economic effects of advertising has not, of course, prevented the making of dogmatic statements about them. But still less are we concerned with such statements here. We begin with causes and we do our best to confine ourselves to causes.

It should be clear that such an approach does not set out from a definition of advertising. The itch for definition is no more appropriate here than it is in any exploratory study. If there is a time to define the subject it comes at the end of the investigation, by which time there is also a reasonable chance that the work will have been sufficiently well done to make definition superfluous. It is not the purpose of this book to put advertising in a nutshell. In fact to attempt anything of the kind would be to fall into the common danger of making generalizations about advertising before the particulars have been thoroughly examined.

This book is written first of all on the assumption that at this time there is more to be gained by examining some of the ideas involved in advertising—general ideas such as wants, information, persuasion, and competition—than by trying to state opinions about the whole phenomenon, the complex of promotional activities of which they form part. Curiosity, objectivity, humility—these seem to be more appropriate for the time being than dogma, polemics, and apologetics. It also seems reasonable to believe that they will have more interesting results. Much of what has been written on the level of this book—that is to say by way of general introduction to the subject of advertising—is repetitive and boring. The attacks of those to whom advertising is a blight and a menace, and the defences of those who, with more or less belief in the values of their work, get their living by it soon fall into a certain monotony. The same arguments recur. The contention that advertising promotes higher sales, and so reduces costs per unit of product, has been flogged within an inch of its life by advertising men. Similarly on the anti-advertising side the same examples, usually of waste and bad taste, tend to recur. Because of this repetitiveness the investigator who must try to read everything and Usten patiently to everyone soon comes to feel that he is having a hard life.

The attempt to sort out the fundamental ideas involved in advertising has at least the advantage that it is breaking ground which, if not entirely unexplored, is still much less familiar than the more superficial public aspects of the subject, which have been canvassed ad nauseam. Similarly, the investigation of the actual way in which advertising business works, may turn out to be more interesting than further argument about its social effects, at least for the time being. Naturally a study of social effects is most desirable in itself. But it is advisable first of all to examine and try to understand the way in which advertisements come into existence.

Thus this book may be regarded as approaching the subject of advertising from two points. It first of all considers some of the basic ideas involved in the subject, with a view to finding out what advertisers are trying to do. It then examines some problems which they come up against in trying to do it. The switch from an analytical and semi-philosophical inquiry to a practical and descriptive study may seem at first to be rather sharp. But at least both approaches are directed to the same point, which is the understanding of the true nature of this large, important, rapidly changing, and controversial branch of business.

2

Wants

HUMAN wants are numerous, complex, imperfectly known, and frequently changing. Advertisers are concerned with making some kind of contact with some kinds of human wants. If we begin with these two obvious statements we at least stand a reasonable chance of avoiding the mistake of thinking that advertising is a simple question which can be disposed of by one or two simple answers. It is in fact a difficult and complicated subject. The economist Frank H. Knight, who has probably written, quite incidentally and in passing, more good sense about advertising than all the other economists put together, and to whom this chapter owes much, has said that ‘these wants which are the common starting-point of economic reasoning are from a more critical point of view the most obstinately unknown of all the unknowns in the whole system of variables with which economic science deals’.¹ We had better recognize that awkward fact from the outset. Having recognized it, we can then try to discover more precisely what advertisers are trying to do, and what the chances are of their succeeding in doing it.

There are, of course, easier, though less realistic, ways of making a start with such study. We could assume that wants are few and simple, or that people know what they themselves want and advertisers know what people want. That is to say that, faced with the enormous complexity of human life, we could begin to try to find out something about it by making more or less arbitrary hypotheses, and then see how they stand up to the test of fact. Economists have indeed commonly used this method in the past. It is easy to see that wants so regarded are a mere abstraction. Most economists make that clear at the outset and many of them remember it as their analysis develops. But here we shall try not to make much use of such procedures. We shall not make simplifying assumptions, reach provisional conclusions, and then see what happens when the assumptions are systematically removed as we try to return to reality. Instead we shall try to keep before us all the time those baffling characteristics of humanity listed at the outset. Human beings want many things. Their wants are complex both singly and in their relationships with each other. Nobody knows exactly what those wants are, and even if that could be discovered today some revision would inevitably be required tomorrow, and the whole wants situation might have changed fundamentally before suitable arrangements could be made to meet it.

At the same time there is no getting round the question by simply saying that the whole subject of wants is impossibly vague and complicated, that there is no accounting for tastes. At least there is no such way round it for anyone who wants to make a serious study of advertising. Advertisers are constantly trying to discover what people want, or to guess what they may want; to suggest new wants, or even to persuade people that they want things when they don't really want them at all. True or false, the want must be there, or be thought to be there.

The question of tastes is one that simply must be pursued anyway. If the advertiser pursues it in order to incorporate effective ‘appeal’ into his advertisement, any serious student of morals must also pursue it in order to discover what distinguishes good taste from bad. In fact in the study of what human beings really want we find it difficult to avoid the question of what they ought to want. The question of fact and the question of morals are always getting mixed up together. Many people, and more particularly educated people, find it difficult to consider human wants and their connection with advertising without making moral judgments–making decisions whether the wants, or the advertisements which try to meet or suggest wants, are good or bad. And, if proper standards of moral judgment are to be used, the ordinary citizen in delving into the nature and justification of wants–in accounting for tastes in fact–may be in pursuit of better wants, more refined tastes, the sort of things we ought to want. What the advertisers are in pursuit of we don't know until we have tried to find out.

There is, of course, one quick way of condemning advertisers and all who scan with care and interest their multifarious announcements and persuasions. This is to postulate that, whatever wants may be in this wicked world, they ought to be few. Is this a valid argument? And has it any practical significance?

First of all the argument for having few and simple wants is of respectable antiquity. The name Stoic still denotes a man of simple tastes. Before there were Stoics properly so-called there were Cynics. One member of that school, Diogenes (fifth century B.C.), is sufficiently famous for the extreme simplicity of his way of life and for the efficiency with which he advertised it. He and his tub still enjoy a certain vulgar notoriety. Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, is said to have led an ascetic life. As to Marcus Aurelius, at the end of the line of Stoic worthies, he no doubt did the best he could to live a Stoic existence within the limits allowed to a Roman emperor. Cynicism (in the modern sense, which is not synonymous with the ancient sense) about the relationship between theory and practice within the Stoic school would be out of place, if only because the rule of simple living which is commonly given all the emphasis in popular modern conceptions of Stoicism is only a part, and not the major part, of the doctrine which was for many centuries at work in the history of religion. It can be traced back into the East and it can be traced forward in the West, with an unmistakable link with Christianity. It has more of religion about it than of a speculative system or a pragmatic code of ethics. It is concerned with an ideal rather than with an invariable rule of life, though, as we shall see later, it is an ideal so seldom attained or even approached in modern times that one wonders whether the arguments used in its support have ever had much practical power at any time when they were not enforced by necessity.

In any case the assertion that wants should be few is not only a part of the Greek heritage. It is found among the teachings of nearly all the major religious leaders. To select only one particular Christian manifestation, it is clearly part of the monastic ideal. Lapses from it have usually been regarded as a sign of degeneracy among the religious. New manifestations of a belief in the virtues of a simple life are constantly emerging in all classes of society, taking such diverse forms as vegetarianism, the youth hostel movement, the encouragement of cottage arts and crafts, and nudism.

A stream of thought and action which has fed, and continues to feed, the persistent belief that a multiplicity of changing wants is undesirable is of course religious puritanism. This particular stream can be traced back to its origin in Christian doctrine, but its expansion into a powerful social and political force which gripped the government of England for a time in the seventeenth century and has never quite died since may perhaps be treated as a separate phenomenon. Its rejection of the demands of the flesh is as positive and unworldly as the stoicism of the ancient world. Presumably the bare Mediterranean ideal of a simple life in the sun would be at best irrevelant to a genuine puritan in the modern religious sense, just as some of the puritan representations of the joys of the world to come would no doubt have been regarded by an ancient Stoic as a picture of tasteless vulgarity. But however anxious puritans may have been to get rid of their inhibitions of the flesh in the world to come they were quite clear that there could be no letting up in this present world. And the puritan ideal remains. The New England housewife still holds it firmly in her mind as she leaves the little white church and drives away in her new car to her centrally heated home with its television, washing machine, dish-washing machine, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, floor-polisher, fully mechanized kitchen, individual baths and showers, and the elaborate do-it-yourself outfits of her husband.

The difficulty is, and always has been, not the fierce and strong attraction of the life of few and simple wants, but the difficulty of actually living such a life. Or perhaps it should be put in a slightly more sophisticated manner. The difficulty is not so much that of moving towards the ideal, or even of remaining in a fixed relationship to it, as of trying to slow up the pace at which we are always moving away from it. This creates a new and more complex problem of frustration. It is perfectly usual among educated people to recognize the attractions of a simple life unencumbered by multiplying wants, and it is equally usual for wants in these circles to multiply continually with results which are often very pleasant, or at any rate are less unpleasant than they are commonly made out to be. So it becomes increasingly difficult to reach the ideal of simplicity but even more difficult to abandon it–as an ideal. New and opprobrious names are invented for the process of multiplying wants and acquiring the means of satisfying them– such as ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’. Advertisers are more and more bitterly assailed in words as they become more effective in forwarding this process.

Yet to suggest that the whole difficulty should be solved by a simple mental act of acceptance, by simply recognizing that wants develop and multiply and being glad of it, is to suggest that some of the most fundamental ideals should be abandoned. It would generally be regarded as a wicked suggestion. It is certainly not going to be made here. But, at the same time, it is clear that wants are constantly multiplying, and to condemn this process while co-operating with it, which is what in fact most educated people do (the less educated co-operate without condemning), is to be dishonest or at any rate muddle-headed. The least we can do is to recognize that this dilemma is a real one. Either we may attempt to reduce our wants to a level at which they are easily satisfied, or we can attempt to extend the means of satisfying wants until the means catch up with the desires. Neither process is simple or easy.

It is also necessary to draw a clear distinction between the multiplication of wants and the changing of wants, the switching from one to another. In practice the two processes go on side by side. It is possibl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Wants
• 3 Information
• 4 Persuasion
• 5 Competition
• 6 Morals
• 7 Appropriations
• 8 Budgets
• 9 Agency
• 10 Technique
• Index