Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/43

Rh advertising a similar effort is required from a much more highly and complexly organized class of people; but the striking success of the best automobile advertising has shown that it, too, has brought the "automobile standard" about. You—as you pick up the magazines and run through the pages—are you not incited to try harder for the acquisition of the things advertised there? Do not the advertisements impel you to make a very conscious additional effort to obtain them—especially, just now, automobiles which take up so much of the space? I am.

But perhaps you say it is not the advertising; it is the seeing of other people with automobiles; it is the passing by the shops displaying certain articles which makes you want them.

Let us go back to soap.

The workingman, whom I have in mind, for years and years rode down in the cars side by side with people who used soap; he saw the effects of soap upon them. But he was used to seeing other people clean; they were another class and could do many other things beside wash often which he could not do. Their cleanliness had no especial application to him.

For years, too, he passed the shops and the counters where soap was for sale. Other things he did not use were for sale there, too. The good soap had little more application to him than the cosmetic for sale beside it.