The Influences of Electronic Technology & Parity Products

A combination of factors interacted to promote the emergence of product­image and product­personality advertising between the 1920s and the early 1950s. Among the most significant were the emergence of photography and radio, the rise of parity products, and the nascent industry of audience demographics and market segmentation strategies.

Technological developments, primarily those in photography and radio, offered novel and dynamic opportunities for the presentation of products. Importantly, photography's representational realism conveyed images as old print illustrations never could, and radio's sound conquered distance and time in transmitting commercial messages. Marketers exploited the possibilities of photography by intensifying the symbolic association between goods and the consumer's self­image. The "new possibilities for the visual in advertising ... stimulated the development of emotional, affective, or 'mood' advertising." ³⁶ Likewise, marketers exploited the potential of Marconi's medium by commercializing radio's content and revolutionizing advertising's form. For example, today's popular "soap opera" is the progeny of radio's experiments in blending dramas with detergents. ³⁷ Under the influences of photography and radio, product facts yielded increasingly to product fictions, and utility deferred increasingly to fantasy.

Additionally, competitive mass production resulted in substantially similar consumer goods. Products, standing alone, were essentially indistinguishable by their ingredients and functions. Numerous beverages, breakfast foods, cosmetics, and detergents, for example, became "parity products," set apart only by their brand names. ³⁸ "If products [did] not differ materially, they [could] nonetheless differ or be made to differ in attributed qualities, or 'image.' If consumers believe[d] a product to be distinctive, this belief in itself [could become a product attribute." ³⁹ Marketers began to differentiate goods less by factual product information and more by product image and personality. "When brand image represents the only distinctive feature the advertiser has to sell, he is more likely to use irrelevant and nonrational appeals ...." ⁴⁰ Essentially, advertising parity products took much of the reason out of reason­why copy. ⁴¹ As ad man Rosser Reeves explained anecdotally: "Our problem is­a client comes into my office and throws two newly minted half dollars onto my desk and says, 'Mine is the one on the left. You prove it's better."' ⁴²