‘Advertising has developed and supported great industries, bulwark ed-‘or increased- ‘entire economies, and changed a sufficient number of human habits’ (Wood 3). Like that paragraph says, advertising effects people in what they do and how they do it. It has effected the Kleenex company, the Nylon manufacturers and a company of a new type of car, the Tucker Corporation, from the 1940’s. Advertising has changed due to these people by their ways of making people notice their product. Preston Tucker advertised his new car early, and received many replies on what the car was about; the Nylon company advertised a day in which their product would start selling and the country ran out of stockings to sell; and the Kleenex company used advertising to decide which of two products they should sell. Advertising has different effects on consumers, it changes their perspective on what is, or is not, worth buying; what they buy, when they buy it and how much are bought.
Advertising ‘symbolizes and concentrates in its image all that is considered good and bad in present day commercial and industrial capitalism in America.’ (Bensman 9). When advertisers plan their strategies for the sale of a certain product, they look at who would use the item. If the product was make-up, the type of person that would use it would most likely be a woman, around the age of thirteen and up. The advertisers would then find an ideal looking woman to model for ads to show the makeup on a person and try to get women to use it.
The way that the advertisers describe the model will also get your attention; they might say that she is not really beautiful until she puts on the makeup, or something along those lines. Advertising is an effective method of communication for several reasons. It is economical, making it possible to carry out a public relations message to a large number of readers at a relatively low cost per reader. It can be highly selective and concentrated on a particular segment of the public such as stockholders, suppliers, or opinion leaders. Intensive community coverage may be secured through the use of local newspapers, radio, or television advertising. Which will provide enough space to tell a complete story and inform and educate people.
The advertiser can control the timing and space given a public relations message by buying a certain amount of time on the air, or space in a specific article or paper (Canfield 493). Advertisers grab your attention with funny, or serious, statements and pictures. They aim at getting you to at least look at their article to see a picture or name of the product they are trying to get you to purchase. Sometimes advertisers use just the product itself trying to get you to notice it, and maybe if you see it in the store you will know what it is. ‘Other advertisers have had to seek out the symbols, characters, brands and slogans with which they identify and advertise their product’ (Wood 270). The slogans are aimed at being ‘catchy’s o that you will remember them, and keep repeating, so you can remember it, and buy it.
Advertising can then be a type of telephone effect, you say it in front of someone else they hear it remember it and start saying it themselves, then they say it to someone else and they remember it, and so on. So word of mouth was a reliable source, as well as the newspapers, radio, and television. ‘Vocal advertisement came first; visual second,’ (Wood 23). There are five creative strategies that advertisers use: 1. Objective (what advertisers should do). 2.
Target Audience (who is your consumer). 3. Key consumer benefit (why the consumer should buy you product). 4. Support (reason to believe in that benefit). 5.
Tone and Manner (a statement of the product ‘personality’). (Kenneth, Roman & Mass 3). With number one the agency that represents a product will see what kind of an angle with which to come forward to the public. What they decide will effect how their ad will go with the public. They do not want to offend anyone, but they want to get people’s attention. With number two the agency will see who the product will be affecting.
If it is for men, they will do a commercial that will catch men’s attention. With number three they will try to convince the consumer that they need this item, and cannot live without it. Number four will support that claim, and number five will give a catchy phrase that will help the consumer remember the name of the product, so that when that person is at the store they will remember that they wanted it and hopefully they will buy it. An example of how advertising has worked comes from the late 1930’s when nylon was first produced, and the making of the nylon stocking, by DuPont, sent a wave of delight throughout the world.
Silk stockings were used before, and according to Frances Picchioni, ‘They snagged very easily and made me very frustrated.’ ‘Test wearers, of the new nylons were quoted as saying the garments endured ‘unbelievable hours of performance.’ ‘ (Panati 346). They were passing in strength and elasticity of the previously known textile fibers. DuPont started advertising early about the ‘miracle yarn’ and the stockings that were made from it. They advertised a day that DuPont would start the sale of the nylon stockings, and they called it ‘NYLON Day’-May 15, 1940, which is when the stockings were to be first sold. The stores had to make their own stockings to be sold and were given a certain amount of yarn and were told to follow the directions exactly and not to sell until the fifteenth of May. When the day came, stores ran out quickly and the DuPont company could not make enough for all the people that wanted one and by the end of that year the company had sold three million dozen stockings (Panati 346) (Encyclopedia).
DuPont took a item that almost all women have and made them more durable and more appealing by making this new textile, and made the interest stronger by making women wait, dream, and fantasize about. Their doing this made their product more exciting and more desirable. If the stockings were distasteful, women probably would have still bought them, but the nylons were very nice and they did last a long time like they said. One reason for that might be because of the fact that since they were scarce, women took better care of their new nylon stockings, than they did the silk ones of the past. After all, women had legs, and never before in history were they so publicly displayed and admired as they were for these advertisements. Another product that excited the world was a fancy new style of car.
Preston Thomas Tucker, the maker, put a two page article in the FIC magazine about his car idea and within a week he received one hundred fifty thousand letters inquiring about his car and how they could get them. He had new and improved safety devices, safety belts, shatter-proof glass, and moving head lights. This is how he won over the people with which he worked. New and improved cars were then able to be made, though it took him quite a while to get the first one running. The advertising used to try to sell stock in his company was original. They did it with the future in mind, and targeted men and women coming home from the war that were interested in a new car.
One of the slogans used for the car was ‘The car of tomorrow today.’ The problem with his trying to sell stock was that he lost the company to a high headed man, named Bennington, the president of Plymouth Corporation, at the time. The Senate was in on it, and they all planned to get the Tucker out of business. Problems came up, the car worked great, but there were financial and legal troubles, and only fifty cars were ever made. (Tucker: The Man And His Dream. ) During World War II Kimberly-Clark invented cellucotton, which was used as an air filter in GI gas masks and as surgical bandage. When the war ended, they had a warehouse full of these cellucotton sheets.
So they looked at alternatives, and so occurred the birth of the Sanitary Cold Cream Remover. The way that this company advertised was by using Hollywood stars and Broadway dancers, saying that you could be like them. These were a disposable substitute for the cloth facial towels, and a package of one hundred cost only sixty-five cents. The manufacturers hired Helen Hayes, Gertrude Lawrence, and Ronald Coleman to model in articles using these tissues, and American women were told that Kleenex Kerchiefs were the ‘scientific way,’ as well as the glamorous way, to remove rouge, foundation, powder, and lipstick. In five years their sales steadily increased. Then mail came in saying their husbands were blowing their noses in their kerchiefs.
So the company became confused on what to do. They went to Peoria, Illinois and asked people to redeem one of two coupons to receive either a free cold cream remover or a free box of tissue, with which the new invention of Andrew Olson the pop-up tissue box was available as well. With two advertisements, one for each, reading ‘We pay (a free box of tissues) to remove cold cream,’ or ‘We pay to prove Kleenex is wonderful for handkerchiefs.’ Sixty-one percent responded to the handkerchief ad (Panati 206). The advertising helped in deciding what idea the company should follow, and what people liked. What makes advertising effective in public relations? In public relations, the owner of a company is trying to sell himself and his product to the people that are interested in buying his product. The person that might want to purchase that item will want to trust the person he or she might buy it from.
If that person does not trust the dealer, or business owner, the consumer might think twice about the item; though, these days no one really cares who makes the product, just as long as it works. ‘Three functions of the communication process are to inform, influence, and convince the public. Advertising performs these same functions.’ (Emery, Ault, Agee 18). What people were looking for in the advertising agencies were the head up over the other products that were out in the market that was similar to what they were trying to sell, so they would see if they could change there product in some way to make it easier to sell. ‘…
if such improvements would give one brand of beverage an advertising or marketing advantage over its competitors, that would be a change worth considering.’ (Petroski 207). In conclusion, the advertisements of today are far more different, with the computer technologies, it is becoming more and more expensive to get things advertised. Television and radio are more expensive these days. With the different variations of popular products people will just get the cheaper product. Getting your product on the market is not as important as getting it there the cheapest as possible, because people are just looking for bargains. Works Cited Bensman, Joseph.
Dollars And Sense. New York: Schock en Books, 1983. Canfield, Bertrand R. D. B.
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Computer Software. Grolier Electronic Publishing, 1992. Kenneth Roman and Jane Maas. How To Advertise. New York: St. Martins Press, 1976.
Panati, Charles. Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York: Perennial Library, 1987. Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc. , 1992. Picchioni, Frances. Personal Interview.
30 November 1994 Tucker: The Man And His Dream. Dir. George Lucas. With Jeff Bridges. Paramount, 1988. Wood, James P.
The Story of Advertising. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1958.