Advertising Choices--To Name Just a Few

by Michael Schumacher
Advertising is all about choices, or more precisely, about influencing consumer choices. And though advertising has been around for centuries, and some could argue for a millennium, it still contains the same basic elements: a product and a reason to purchase that product.

One of the earliest success stories in advertising is that of Pears Soap, first manufactured in the 18th century. When Thomas Barratt (1842-1914), considered by some the father of advertising, married into the Pear family, he launched one of the first ad campaigns using, but what else, children — a theme that still sells well today. Featuring these cherub-like images, Barratt’s ads conveyed two important product messages: purity and simplicity, qualities important to consumers of that time.
Advertising as we know it today was born with the emergence of a growing marketplace and the technology to support more advanced types of promotions. However, what must baffle consumers today more than ever is the sheer volume of product assortments from foodstuffs to cosmetics to industrial wares.

Soap has changed for better or worse
Barratt could not have foreseen the types of soaps available today. The product ranges from traditional soap bars, an increasingly rare find, to cleansing bars (not soap) to the many liquid varieties — scented apple, lavender, almond-cherry (that’s what we’re using this week), fresh meadow, pine, even musk, to name just a few. There are also unscented or antibacterial versions. But these are all only for hand washing; there’s a whole other line of bath and shower gels: scented, unscented, made especially for women, made especially for men, made especially for sports-minded men and women, to name just a few. With all this soap, perhaps history will one day dub us as “the cleanest generation.”

Those Americans who drink orange juice in the morning, and that’s 21% of us daily, must have noticed the slew of varieties available today. While it’s still possible to purchase plain old OJ, supermarket shelves hold many other types as well. One of the leading brands alone, Tropicana, has the following varieties (with added Immune Defenses): Home Style with pulp, Grove Stand with some pulp, Low Acid, and Light n’ Healthy with half the sugar. Added to these are the non-orange juices such as grapefruit (both golden and ruby red), pineapple-orange, pineapple-banana, and mandarin orange, to name just a few.

Leaving the consumer in a quandary
The problem with so many choices is that they can imply that making any one selection means you are not getting what the others offer. Choose low-acid orange juice and you sacrifice immune defenses or half the sugar.

And should anyone get a paper cut today, or your child scrape his or her knee, you too have a profusion choices in the type of bandages to apply. They include: liquid and spray-on bandages, ionized-silver bandages, waterproof bandages, moist-environment bandages, easy-to-remove ones (my favorite), anti-itch, anti-bleeding (aren’t they all?), anti-bacterial (wonder if it’s double protection if you use the anti-bacterial soap first?), bandages that fit over knuckles, medicated ones to minimize scars, cushioned ones to heal blisters, those decorated with cartoon characters and clear ones, so no one will notice, to name just a few.

return to September 2004 Ad Talk