Advertising and the Industrial Revolution

When goods were handmade, by local craftsmen, in small quantities, there was no need for advertising. Buyer and seller were personally known to one another, and the buyer was likely to have direct experience of the product. The buyer also had much more contact with the production process, especially for items like clothing (hand-stitched to fit) and food (assembled from simple, raw ingredients). Packaging and branding were unknown and unnecessary before the Industrial Revolution. However, once technological advances enabled the mass production of soap, china, clothing etc, the close personal links between buyer and seller were broken. Rather than selling out of their back yards to local customers, manufacturers sought markets a long way from their factories, sometimes on the other side of the world.

This created a need for advertising. Manufacturers needed to explain and recommend their products to customers whom they would never meet personally. Manufacturers, in chasing far-off markets, were beginning to compete with each other. Therefore they needed to brand their products, in order to distinguish them from one another, and create mass recommendations to support the mass production and consumption model.

Newspapers provided the ideal vehicle for this new phenomenon, advertisements. New technologies were also making newspapers cheaper, more widely available, and more frequently printed. They had more pages, so they could carry more, bigger, ads. Simple descriptions, plus prices, of products served their purpose until the mid nineteenth century, when technological advances meant that illustrations could be added to advertising, and color was also an option. Advertisers started to add copy under the simple headings, describing their products using persuasive prose.

Bubbles — the Pears' Soap Advertising Innovation

An early advertising success story is that of Pears Soap. Thomas Barratt married into the famous soap making family and realized that they needed to be more aggressive about pushing their products if they were to survive. He bought the copyright to a painting by noted Pre-Raphaelite artist, Sir John Everett Millais, originally entitled 'Bubbles'. Barratt added a bar of Pears' Soap to the bottom left of the image, and emblazoned the company name across the top, launching the series of ads featuring cherubic children which firmly welded the brand to the values it still holds today. He took images considered as "fine art" and used them to connote his brand's quality, purity (i.e. untainted by commercialism) and simplicity (cherubic children). The campaign was a huge success. However, Millais was attacked across the board for allowing his work to be sullied by association with a commercial product. Thus began the opposition between advertising, and Art.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 973