Evening Star Newspaper, April 21, 1929, Page 9

and vice versa. Whether the advertising appeal of the moment be blindfold tests, testimonials pro- duced by hot-house methods or so-called modern- istic art, or extravagant and almost ecstatic eulogy, the old primal relation between buyer and seller is not disturbed. The buyer is still looking for his dollar’s worth, the seller if he has even a modicum of good sense and desires to build even 2 semi-per- manent business is still trying to give him that dollar’s worth. It is unhappily true that we have in large measure become standardized in thinking and reading and doing and that we are therefore in a measure susceptible to mast movements in merchandising and advertising. Temporarily a great many of os "do respond to these pasing styles and fashions of ' advertising appeal. i But these yieldings to the spell of the spellbinder 'are not permanent. They do not constitute 8 complete surrender of the really vital integrities - of the individual. Howsoever he may grope and struggle for their expression, poor old Man has certain private ideas of what constitutes right and wrong to which he clings tenaciously through changing styles and fashions of thought. Chesterton expresses it beautifully in his great book The Ball and the Cross which is the epic controversial struggle between an Atheist and a Christian. The two admirable exponents of dis- sent and assent stagger dueling across the map of England through several hundred polemical pages. In desperation they ultimately submit the great controversial question of God-or-no-God to an . English peasant befuddled with ale whom they follow from an inn down a dark country road... He resents their bewildering questions. He finds in every phrase they utter a challenge to his liberty as an individual and sums up his indignation in the defiant and drunken declaration repeated over and over again that he is a Man! He has ‘aserted his dignity and they have found an an- " swer—and this answer is that whatever else may be, Man is a MAN. And that is the answer even in so slight a thing as/business and so evan- escent a thing as advertising. , No matter how many his falls from grace, no " matter how far he may fellow after false prophets, Man is a MAN and feor the best good of all con- cerned should be tréated as # man even in the inconsequential affairs of buying and selling adver tising and business. . * *® Ed AND WHAT 4RE THE THINGS in barter'and tradeat least which he feels to the very depth of his being and sums up in the grandiloquent declaration that he is 2 man? Why, the old time-tried etérnal . verities, of course—the prossic maxims of the ~_copy book, the clemental decencies between man and man, the principles of fair dealing, the rights which must not be transgressed, the exchange of service for service, the return of a dellar of value for every dollar expended. To imply in an advertisement that a certain book on Will Power actually possesses strange occult magic properties, that it accomplishes almost in- stantaneously a revolution in the will structure of any man who picks it up, would seem to be slightly out of tune with this spirit of decent deal- ing which every man expects and ultimately demands. To make impossible promises of any kind for any product would seem not merely not emart but short sighted and silly. The triumphant interrog- atory retort—Ah! but how do you account for the fact that it payst—is no retort atall. If our busi- ness system must look for its justification to some of the huge fortunes being swiftly reared by im- possible creatures in divers dubious ways then the sooner this industrial system is wrecked the better for all of us. * * ® BROADLY SPEAKING there are only two schools of advertising thought and experience. One of these schools proceeds upon the comfortable half truth that all men are fools. The other amends this ever so slightly and says that all men may be fools but—in italics and with emphasis—that they do not like to be fooled. Out of both schools emerge great businesses and great fortunes. The first is especially successful in stirring up a demand for small articles of com- merce which cost the consumer a comparatively slight sum. In these lesser matters we Americans are notoriously careless in buying. We even fall under the spell for a momentof the glowing claims made for such products—and these claims are carefully calculated to approach to the very edge of untruth before they come to a full stop. The penalty paid for this process is that the mar- ket must continuously be renewed and rebuilt. A new audience must be gathered over and over again Jaround the gasoline flare of the hawker's wagon. A million or so of young men and women come of age every year and they are fre- quently easy prey for the exaggerations, fads and fancies of the advertising moment. As the sell- ing price of the product increases, however, the process of proceeding upon the asumption that all men are fools encounters difficulty. Setting the moralities aside for the time being a reasonable rule for advertisers to follow would be that it is not safe to attempt to build up a business on the assumption that all men are fools when the article advertised costs the consumer more than ten dollars, Money has a 'memory which persists in direct proportion to the amount dis- appointingly iavested. Of course no manufacturer would admit for a moment that he considers his market constituted chiefly of foels. But there is ample evidence in the thickly populated advertising pages of period- _icals and newspapers that he allows his advertising te talk for him as though he did belicve it. Huyman formulas of whateversort—social, political or commercial—are bound to be imperfect be- cause human nature is imperfect and this is much more true of the looser practices of life such as advertising in the demain of trade. Indeed it is scarcely possible to devise a formula for advertis- ing any more explicit than the oné indicated herein ™ “—a decent recognition of the human decencies. The two things we know with any degree of certainty about business sre that people like to be fairly dealt with and that they resent being unfairly dealt with, All the facts and figures and tables and blueprints and survéys and graphs and all of the economic data which the statistician can com- pile will not negative this universal fact, It is merely silly therefore to try to build s busines by catering to the worst in human nature rather - than striving to sink that business into the solid foundation of human decency. And we are not altogether without ways and means of cataloging these decencies and devising methods of sounding susceptible keynotes com- mon to all men which are at least measurably certain of return. * * * THERE ARE CERTAIN sure-fire appeals to which almost all humans respond. There are grounds for saying that most dramatic plots have their source and origin in one plot—the Cinderella theme or motif. That of course is due to the fact that the Cinderella theme comprehends the poignant human principles of reward and punishment, the uplifting of the humble, the humiliation of the proud, the victory of love and beauty and inno- cence.” Strange as it may seem there are a set of basic human appeals which operate just as sue- cessfully in business as in romantic literature. After two thousand years of weary endeavor to find theanswer toStevenson’sexasperated question when he wrote in defense of the idler and against the mere busy-ness of business—*In the name of God " whatisall this pother about?”—people do cling to their pathetic love of the hero and hatred of the villain. Melodrama isin a very true sense real life in that it depicts the virtuous victories which we would like to encounter in real life. Everyone prefers to do business with an honest man —everyone prefersto buy honestgoods. Noamount of advertising can compensate for a fault or a flaw in the thing advertised. The good man is still the hero of ordinary life, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, and good goods are still preferred to meretricious goods. Not only that, but good men—good manufacturers and good managers— good methods, good motives, good value, continue to build the more permanently profitable busi- nesses. The bewildered layman will naturally smile at the idea of inculcating and dramatizing and capitalising human preferences for honor and honesty in so prosaic a medium as advertising. A lifetime of experience in endeavoring to do so is offered as evidence that it may and can be done. * * & THE REAL TRUTH of the matter is that there is no such thing asa modern mind when it comes to the eternal verities. The modern mind feels about these things pretty much as did the primitive mind. The other fin de siecle outcroppings are merely surface expressions which do not disturb ' the deep rooted and more or less immovable human convictions. Instead of appealing to the a so-called modern mind the wise and safe thing to do is to build upon the convictions, preferences and predilections of the universal mind. The basic motives which animate the modern man looking for a good radio are as old as man even though the radio be almost as new s the morning sun. Itis not always necesmry for the advertiser to write these things into his advertising-—but he should be everlastingly aware of them. This is the only common ground upon which he can meet the mass of humans. If he attempts to cater to their whims, their weaknesses, their vanities, their un- intelligence, he will be lost. It has been said that people in the mass at the first glance look very like a mess. They do and are ex- cept for this saving grace that they have common chords of decency which can be struck in veried and various skillful ways. We have enumerated the hero, the good man, honesty, honor and valae, as some of the desiderata of human conduct upon which most people are agreed. They also respond as we all know to the child- hood motif, the success theme, the rise of the poor man to power and position, tae appeal of the appe- tite, the home and mother appeal, the flag and the nation. None of these is unworthy and it is not unworthy to appeal to them unless it is done in 2 spirit of demagogy and deceit. *® * * IT SOUNDS TRITE to the point of banality to say that a business really built and conducted and advertised upon a respect for its clientele—which means a respect for the rights of the human being —will more surely succeed than one which is not so built, but it happeéns to be true, and even a truth about business is a valuable find in this skeptical age. It is likewise odd and interesting to observe that advertising which attracts attention by its smart- ness—advertising which finds its way on to the musical comedy stage—advertising which is given free advertising by being laughingly repeated over and over again by thousands of people—‘‘wise- crack” advertising in other words—quite frequent- ly pulls down the business structure which it was intended to build up. The little ephemeral vogue which it gives to its product is all too brief and. the aftermath, when its influence has passed, is little short of deadly. The manufacturer who advertises in that way is literally paying for his fun, for if there is in his ““wisecracking” an element of speciousness or in- sincerity the public probably recognizes the fact at once and will certtinly ferret it out in a matter of months. After that—the deluge, or a new set of expedients. So perhaps the answer to the question propounded at the outset is not so difficult after all. The inquiry was—are we all silly, or isit just advertising that is silly? The answer probably is that we are all silly but that we all have our underlying sanities. Adver- tising has gone amuck in that it has mistaken the surface silliness for the sane solid substance of an averagely-decent human nature.