One of the most authoritative voices speaking to us today is, of course, the voice of the advertisers. Its shrilling clamor dominates our lives. It shouts at us from the television screens and the radio loudspeakers; waves to us from every page of the newspaper; plucks at our sleeves on the escalator; signals to us from the road-side billboards all day and flashes messages to us in colored lights at night. It has forced on us a whole new conception of the successful man as a man no less than 20% of whose mail consists of announcements of giant carpet sales.
Advertising has been among England’s biggest growing industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrate achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure
Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufacturers from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer-appeal to all his other problems of man-hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find eleven ways of it appeal to purchasers after they finished it, by pretending that it gives status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is in clover (养尊处优).
Other manufacturers find advertising saves them from changing their product. And manufacturers hate changes. The ideal product is one or another, some alteration seems called for--how much better to change the image, the packet or the pitch (促销宣传) made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself.
The form of advertising which has best succeeded in giving personal status on the individual makes use of