Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s

2. Advertising Challenged: The Creation of Consumers' Research Inc. and the Rise of the 1930s Consumer Movement

2 Advertising Challenged: The Creation of Consumers’ Research Inc. and the Rise of the 1930s Consumer Movement After the first wave of consumer activism in the early twentieth century , organized consumer activity tapered off by the end of World War I. No longer pushing for major federal regulation,consumer organizations largely concerned themselves with retail prices and sanitary issues. The National Consumers’ League (NCL) remained active. In addition to working on its white-label campaign, the organization also harnessed its political power to promote fair minimum wage and labor standards.1 Scholars note how the surviving strands of progressive thought influenced social and political thinking as the Roaring Twenties came to an end and the Great Depression approached.2 By the end of the decade a new surge of consumer activism, similar in many respects to its Progressive Era predecessor, was emerging. This consumer movement consisted of several loose-knit organizations with somewhat different strategies. Much like Progressive Era consumer activists,who had focused their efforts on food safety and the passage of the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906, the new consumer movement pushed for legislation. Unlike those in the previous movement, however, the newcomers directed their attention to advertising. In the early twentieth century advertising had been a relatively new phenomenon and few could have predicted its immense growth. By the late 1920s, however, advertising had become the key means of communication between manufacturers and consumers. This link, according to the budding consumer movement, was not without problems. Because most advertising failed to provide much product information, consumers were ignorant about products. Leading a crusade to educate consumers about 22 . advertising on trial advertising’s pitfalls was Consumers’ Research Inc., a group that quickly gained support from other organizations and from consumer advocates who had been appointed to the Consumer Advisory Board in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration. In this advertising age the contours of the modern consumer movement were shaped. Advertising and the Second Wave of Consumer Activism During the first three decades of the twentieth century Americans witnessed a massive increase in branded goods. By 1930, for example, consumers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, could chose among 87 brands of breakfast foods, 93 brands of butter, 101 brands of packaged coffee, 256 brands of toothbrushes, 73 brands of shaving cream, and 76 brands of toothpaste.3 The task of differentiating each product from its many competitors was left to advertising, and between 1900 and 1930 advertising expenditures increased fivefold from $542 million in 1900 to $2.6 billion in 1930.4 As national companies grew and operated in more oligopolistic markets, consumers could barely discern tangible differences between products. In a whole range of categories, and especially among the small-ticket items that consumers used daily,manufacturers were hard-pressed to point out substantial differences that set their products apart from those of their competitors. The particular quality of a soap,perfume,mouthwash,or toothpaste no longer distinguished a brand but rather the emotional attributes that consumers associated with it. The irony of modern advertising was that the more alike products in a certain category were, the more manufacturers had to increase their advertising to convince consumers that there were differences. Small and cheap commodities were virtually indistinguishable from one another,so their advertising had to be distinct. “The number and variety of these small articles and the makers of them are so numerous, the competition among them so intense,” remarked one observer, “that the sponsor of any new but similar product must find some novel peculiarity to exploit rather than any inherent qualities which his products may possess.”5 By the 1920s the trend swung toward image-driven ads that played on people ’s fears and insecurities.6 “People rarely buy ‘things,’” advised a J. Walter Thompson memo directed at copywriters. “They put down their money for what things will do for them; sell the ‘complexion’ not the soap.” The most active human virtue, reminded the advertising executive, is hope: “That’s why the ‘promise’ is the most important thing in advertising.”7 According to one study, advertisements based on logical appeal shrank from 62 percent in advertising challenged · 23 the 1900s to 35.5 percent in the 1930s, whereas advertising appealing to emotions increased from 27 percent of all product advertisements in the 1900s to 42 percent of the total in 1930.8 An industry-sponsored study conducted in 1931 confirmed...