Advertising, brands and markets

Earlier ideas about how advertising works have been superseded by new views based on the considerable amount of empirical evidence now available.

Advertising, brands and markets

Michael WatersonThe Advertising Association

INTRODUCTION

Advertising has been criticised on the grounds that advertising not only sells brands but also supports and expands the overall level of consumption of such products. Views of this nature, which essentially portray the consumer as a rather helpless being, hardly able to resist the manipulative skills of the advertiser, were popularised alongside views of advertising as economically wasteful by a number of influential writers in the 1950s and 1960s.

A fairly typical summary of some of the better-known views of this period is as follows:

Vance Packard in his...

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