1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
4 The Rise of Advertising - Mass Circulation
|
||
We have just seen that choice is determined by the factors creating the utility goods and services are thought to possess. Before attempting an analysis of the precise nature and relative influence of these determinants, it is important that we note a few of the more significant psychological aspects of choice-making. For, in reality, many of the determinants just mentioned affect choice by modifying psychic processes. Advertising copy, for example, is capable of influencing the choices of millions of consumers simply because it is based upon the application of certain wellknown psychological principles. Realizing the potency of fear, enterprisers threaten us with everything from pink toothbrush to social ostracism if we do not use their wares. Our feelings of inferiority are the commercial basis for impelling the purchase of scores of objects we would never buy were we not goaded in so sensitive a spot. Desires for preeminence betray us into the selection of correspondence courses in civil engineering or the installment purchase of five-foot shelves of culture. Line, color, and typography; shape, size, and texture; flattery, threats, and warnings--all are used to enhance, for us, the supposed utility of commodities. It is in this sense that the determinants of choice function through psychic media; and an understanding of how such choices are molded is possible only after an inspection of the psychological phenomena involved.
Since psychologists are busy elsewhere and many marginal economists have clung to preconceived notions, we must rely, for our information about choice mechanisms, on the numerous studies made from the point of view of the merchant who seeks to understand the psychology of choice so that he may create a market for his product. The psychology of advertising and selling is each year receiving more assiduous attention. And it is among the findings of these researches that we must seek a partial answer to our query, "What are the psychological bases of choicemaking?"
The real novelty of the daily press was not so much its content as the scale of its enterprise and its financing. In the last years of the 19th century, as the range of packaged food and drugs and manufactured goods intended for private consumption dramaticaliy increased, advertising became the mechanism by which the distribution of goods within the economy was stimulated,and regulated.
In the 1890s advertising agencies no longer simply soId space in newspapers or magazines. They began to advise their clients on the design and appearance of their advertisements, and as they did so they created a crucial instrument, by which a mass public could be educated to desire the pleasures of consumption. Harmsworth and his American counterparts recognized that the new technology of Linotype typesetting machines and the fast rotary printing presses made possible the rapid mass production of millions of copies of a newspaper or magazine. Thus we learn that a hair dye must be advertised as a hair sheen, else the customers whose hair is beginning to turn gray are ashamed to ask for it. An air-line company addresses its comforting advertisements not so much to the largely masculine travelers as to the family who stay at home and are afraid an accident may befall the breadwinner. Fear and shame, bright hopes and secret dreams, every possible movement of the soul in every changing moment of contemporary history must be tracked down, measured, analyzed and put to use to give the advertisement exactly the right effect. Intuition alone must be mistrusted. Nothing but scientific dissection of the mass soul promises results.
Circulation became crucial because the larger a papers circulation the more it could charge advertisers for space. Display advertising replaced the uniform colurnns of dassified advertisements. This new source of revenue and the demands of mass circulation meant that the costs of each copy to the reader were cut to a minimum: in Britain the Daily Mail saId for a halfpenny, and took nearly half its income from advertising sales. To guess the tastes and requirements of the Average customer is the popular never-ending game of the American consumer industry. About fifty thousand market investigators, inquirers into public opinion, results testers, statistical analysts and psychological advisers are exclusively occupied day by day in foretelling, at least approximately, the behavior of the incalculable consumer.
The press followed the example of other industries in incorporating into larger chains or groups of publications. New owners such as Hearst, Northcliffe and Arthur Pearson (who founded the Daily Express in competition with the Mail in 1900) came to recognize the advantages of economies of scale. By 1923 Hearst owned 22 daily and 15 Sunday papers, nine magazines, including Casmapalitan and Harper' s Bazaar, news and syndication services and a Sunday supplement, the American Weekly. His publicists daimed that one American family in four read a Hearst publication. He was the biggest user of paper in the world.
4 Next Page: The Early Film Industry: Foundation of Hollywood
|
||
Chapters: 
Magazine for Ladies: Home Journal had been founded in 1883 as one of the new breed of magazines aimed at a female readership.