Constantly I am being invited, through the mails or the advertising
columns, to buy something because it is different. Such appeals are
wasted upon me. In the realm of ideas, I am as radical as the best of
them, in many ways. But when it comes to shopping I am afraid of change.
The advertising writer is the most unoriginal creature imaginable. He is
more imitative than a theatre manager on Broadway. He is more imitative
than the revolutionaries of art, the Impressionist who imitates the
Romanticist, the Post-Impressionist who imitates the Impressionist, the
Cubist who imitates the Post-Impressionist, the Futurist who imitates
the Cubist, and the Parisian dressmaker who imitates the Futurist. When
a happy word or phrase or symbol is let loose in the advertising world,
it is caught up, and repeated, and chanted, and echoed, until the sound
and sight of it become a torture. How long ago is it since every
merchantable product of man's ingenuity from automobiles to xylophones
was being dedicated to "his majesty the American citizen"? How long is
it since every item in the magazine pages was something ending in ly,
"supremely" good, or "potently" attractive, or "permanently" satisfying,
or in any other conceivable phrase, adverbially so? To-day the
mail-order lists are crammed with commodities that are different. Oh,
jaded American appetite that refuses to accept a two-for-a-quarter Troy
collar unless it is different!
Now the truth that must be apparent to any man who will only think for a
moment--and by all accounts your advertising writer is always engaged in
a hellish fury of cerebration--is that there are a great many
commodities whose value depends on the very fact that they shall not be
different, but the same. If I were engaged in the business of publicity,
I cannot imagine myself writing, "Try our eggs--they are different." I
should also hesitate to write, "Sample our lifeboats, they are
different; try them and you will use no other." If I were working for
the gas company I should never think of saying, "Come in and look at our
gas metres, they are different." It requires little effort to draw up a
list of marketable goods, services, and utilities for which it would be
no recommendation at all to say that they are different. Thus:
Railway time tables.
Photographs.
Grocers' scales.
Complexions.
Affidavits, and especially statements made in swearing off personal
property tax assessments.
Clocks.
Individual shoes of a pair.
The multiplication table.
The Yosemite Valley.
In every instance it would manifestly be absurd to try to prove that the
object in question is anything but what we have always known it to be
or expected it to be.
On the other hand, there is a great class of commodities which one would
never think of taking seriously unless we were assured that they are
different from what we have always found them to be. If some ingenious
inventor could really put on the market a Tammany Hall that was
different, or a hair tonic that was different, or something different in
the way of
Hat plumes (guaranteed not to tickle).
Musical comedy.
Rag-time.
Domestic help.
Book-reviews.
Winter temperature at Palm Beach (as compared with temperature in New
York city).
Remarks on the weather.
Mr. Carnegie's speeches.
Remarks on Maude Adams.
Epigrams about women.
Epigrams about love.
Epigrams about money.
Epigrams.
Food prices.
Florence Barclay.
Golf drivers (guaranteed not to slice).
Brassies (guaranteed not to top).
Mid-irons (guaranteed not to cut).
Advertising.
And countless other things which every one can imagine being different
in a better-organised world than ours.
But does your advertising expert recognise the distinction between
things which must under no consideration be different and things which
must be made different if they are to find acceptance? Not in the least.
In season and out he sounds his poor little catch-word, and frightens
away as many customers as he attracts. Under such circumstances one can
only wonder why advertising should continue to be the best-paid branch
of American literature. Of what use are the Science of Advertising, the
Psychology of Advertising, the Dynamics of Advertising, the Ethics of
Advertising, the Phonetics of Advertising, the Strategy and Tactics and
Small-Fire Manuals of Advertising--on all of which subjects I have
perused countless volumes--if all this theoretical study will not teach
a man that it is appropriate to say: "Try our latest Hall Caine, it is
different," and quite out of place to say, "Try our quart measures, they
are different"?
Between the things that must never be different and the things that
ought never to be the same, there is a vast class of commodities which
may be the same or may be different according to choice. Linen collars,
musical machines, newspapers, ignition systems, interior decoration--it
is evident that some people may like them the same and some people may
like them different. My own inclinations, as I have intimated, are
toward the same, but my sympathies are with those who want things
different. The argument advanced by the advertiser in behalf of his
latest three-button, long-hipped, university sack with rolling collar,
that it is different and that it radiates my individuality, leaves me
cold. I am not moved by the plea that the rolling-collar effect is so
different that a quarter-million suits of that model have already been
sold west of the Alleghanies. I remain indifferent on being told that
the three-button effect would radiate my individuality even as it is
radiating the individuality of ten thousand citizens of Spokane. When it
is a choice between wearing unindividual clothes of my own or being
different with a hundred thousand others, I suppose I must be classed as
a reactionary and a fossil.