What Advertising Might Become
In.—A Corrective of Some National Inertias WHAT these articles suggest, of course, is that the true function of advertising is much less merely to push one man's wares as against another's than to make better known • to the public how they can avail themselves of the output of British industry in at present unrealized ways ; and to break down some of our con- servatism about those new ways. Advertising in this sense is an indispensable element in the restoration and maintenance of prosperity for a country like Britain, which, more than any other whatsoever, perhaps, must adapt itself to the changing conditions of modern life. Conceived as the dissemination of knowledge about new methods, products, devices, and as the use of the psychology of persuasion and suggestion to break down inertia and prejudice, to correct• tendencies in national character which circumstances of the past have created, advertising might play a very large and very beneficent role.
America has developed this form of advertising more than we have, and the result is the improvement of American life on its mechanical side—more sanitary houses, greater cleanliness, less labour for the housewife, greater efficiency. (These things do not make the good life, it is true, but in our day the good life has become impossible without them.) An element we usually overlook in this matter is that unless a great many adopt the new methods, nobody can adopt them. Not merely is it true that the utility of your telephone depends largely upon other people having the telephone, but unless the things of modern use can be made by large-scale production they cannot be brought within the price of the mass. Everybody -or nobody. And for everybody to know about the new things means large-scale advertising too, which generally in the cases under consideration must mean collective advertising, setting forth a constant stream of reminder and sugges. tion, to say nothing of definite knowledge of a seIfl. technical kind. For advertising and its justification rests on the fact that it does not suffice merely to mit known a fact to a man for him to act upon it. We art all so lazy, such creatures of routine, that we go on in out daily conduct ignoring the bit of new knowledge, all finally, maybe, forgetting it altogether, unless it brought home to us again and again. There were lute in the popular magazines in England in the very earl 'seventies or earlier about the use of the typewriter most educated people by 1875 had heard of some mac or other for mechanical writing, but it was nearly a whal generation before its use had become general and chair the character of office work. The slowness of realizat had this, among other results : America, quicker, traditional and less tied to routine, developed the des'° and completely captured the Vast manufadturing and to. which it.gave rise. In so far as being in a favo situation for supplying the world, the presence of skilled artisans, old-established mechanicat equipment were concerned, we were better off than America. But the whole industry, with a completeness that is astounding, passed into the unquestioned possession of the United States.
The fact which should interest us in it all is not merely the loss of particular trades, important as that is in the circumstances of Great Britain, but that we who were the first in the field in the application of power to man's needs have now fallen a whole generation behindhand in our effective use of the mechanical aids of civilization, with a consequent decline in the efficiency of one side of our lives. And it won't do to say that we have a sounder philosophy of life which disdains mechanical aid. For whether it be in the belated development of the telephone, or the application of efficient plumbing and sanitation to our houses and hotels (we used to laugh at Continentals about their sanitation, and the majority of our hotels to-day are less well equipped in the matter of baths and running water than the majority on the Continent), or the everyday motor car ; whatever the mechanical aid, we don't disdain it. We come to it in the end, but we come late. There would be something to say for the Tibetan pose of being superior to mechanical contrivances in our lives if we stuck to it. But we don't. We use the typewriter or the cash register, but it happens to be an American one.
Why, if we are going to take to these things sooner or later, do we not take to them sooner—and gain thereby our due share in the profits of their manufacture and sale ?
If we could have imagined some sort of Federation of British Industry organized at the time that the typewriter was invented, being both more far-seeing and more given to initiative than such organizations usually are, and setting about a thoroughgoing education of the public, hammering away so efficiently through a scientific advertising campaign that within twelve months every office head in the country was converted to the new machine, two things would have resulted : An improve- ment of method which had to come, and did come finally, would have been advanced a generation to the better maintenance of the British commercial position ; and there would probably have been preserved to British industry part at least of a great trade which probably now can never be obtained.
To have achieved this result would have meant, not merely informing a number of business men that a writing machine, probably destined to transform office work, had been invented and was for sale, but an advertising so intensive that established habits and prejudices would have yielded to the influence. The thing has been accomplished finally, but the forces, which have wrought the change--the transmission of information from one office to another, the change of habit resulting—have heetl among the unorganized haphazard forces. My suggestion is that a more scientific conception of adver- tising would make them less haphazard, more conscious, more controllable. _ The case I have chosen is purely for purposes of illustra- 1011- It would not, in the circumstances, have been asonable to ask that degree of initiative or prevision ither of business or industry, then in a much less highly rganized state than now, and then absorbed in about as itch business as the country could handle. But it is easonable to ask that we of this less fortunate generation hall profit by the past, and by realizing why certain Pportunitie$ of the past have been missed, take steps see that fewer are missed in the future.
NORMAN ANGELL.
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