Product-Image & Product-Personality Advertising

Ad copy writing took on a formulaic style, popularized as "reason­why" salesmanship by the celebrated ad men Albert Lasker and Claude Hopkins. ²⁴ The turn­of­the­century trade journal Printers' Ink described  reason­ why copy as "[l]ogic, plus persuasion, plus conviction, all woven into a certain simplicity of thought­pre­digested for the average mind, so that it is easier to understand than to misunderstand it." ²⁵ A revealing example of this advertising style was the 1905 advertisement for Gillette razors in which "we find testimonials, scientific data from the University of Chicago, and an exploded drawing of the new instrument." ²⁶ In summary, the basic character of advertising in the early modern period was more information than image, more rational than emotive, more need­based than desire­based. Thus, prior to the 1920s, "the implied relationship between people and products [was] utility.... The question for the consumer [was], What does this product do?" ²⁷

The product­information advertising form declined significantly after the 1920s. ²⁸ Generally speaking, it was replaced by a model of competitive mass advertising that stressed product imagery and product personality. "Product­image" advertising placed commodities within natural or social settings (such as landscapes or households) in order to project the meanings and values associated with those settings onto the commodities. ²⁹ Similarly, "product­personality" advertising equated the personal attributes of individuals (product users or members of a particular social group) with the qualities of the commodity; in its most exaggerated form, this advertising culminated in the "personification" of the product itself, infusing commodities with human traits or animal characteristics. ³⁰ Thus, for example, a fragrance could be sexy or a vehicle tiger­like. ³¹

As product­information advertising yielded to product­image and product­ personality advertising, "the older factual, prosy notice which focused upon the specifications of the commodity ... gave way to a more lyrical type of appeal which focused instead upon the desires of the consumer." ³² Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, Inc., acknowledged as much when he claimed: "In the factory we make cosmetics, in the store we sell hope." ³³ Influenced by the new forms of advertising, the meaning of the commercial exchange altered fundamentally: transactions of money for product image and personality largely eclipsed the earlier transactions of money for product utility. This new economic exchange was predicted by an early twentieth century ad man, James Collins, who presciently labeled it an "economy of symbolism." ³⁴ Later, in The Mechanical Bride, an equally prescient Marshall McLuhan analyzed the nonrational advertising phenomenon as aiming "to generate heat not light." ³⁵