Mass production forced advertising to both create demand and manufacture brand reputation

Evidence

We have said that creating demand for new products was the first great goal of the early advertising industry. Otherwise, as Resor once explained, “the achievements of American mass production would fall of their own weight.” The second great objective realized in the 1920s was the engineering of reputation, also known as branding. … Brands hardly existed before mass production; in a prior age, it was the reputation of the individual merchant that did the work, much as it still does today for doctors, accountants, and other professionals. But by the 1920s, advertisers came to understand that a reputation, once necessarily earned, could now be manufactured like a war-will or any consumer good. And so over the early part of the century, American and European firms invested millions to create associations with names that previously had no broad connotations, names like “Cadillac,” “Kraft,” “Lucky Strike,” “Heinz,” “Coca-Cola,” and so on. The fact that all of these remain familiar and enjoy enviable sales nearly a hundred years on shows how that initial investment, if properly husbanded, can pay dividends indefinitely. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 201

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how the diamond trade’s extralegal reputation systems work — where reputation is earned privately rather than manufactured — from the diamond bourse material. — connects to: Post-war advertising shifted from selling products to manufacturing and commodifying desire. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 119; Advertising’s stated purpose was to manufacture needs, not merely inform — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 468; Cigarette advertising created both a dangerous-product market and a durable oligopoly — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 274 (+3 more)
• CANDY: The observation that brand names like Cadillac, Kraft, and Coca-Cola still dominate nearly a century later is an easy conversational fact.