Classes to masses? How advertising agencies responded to the challenges of the mass market in interwar Britain

"A number of authors, such as Hamish Fraser (1981) for the case of the United Kingdom, Wolfgang König (2000) for Germany and Richard Tedlow (1990) for the case of the United States have argued that the coming of the mass market was triggered by both new forms of mass production as well as a growing demand for mass-produced goods in the fast-moving-consumer-goods sector and in the “white” consumer goods sector. In this narrative, the triumph of the unified mass market and its cultures of mass consumerism were heralded by advertising agencies which acted as efficient multipliers of the sales messages of producers and as skilled stimulators of mass demand for new products. In my paper I compare the response of British and American advertising agencies in the United Kingdom to the challenges set by the emerging mass market. British agencies were well adapted to a system in which the manufacturer’s agent was paid for buying space in newspapers and for rendering additional services such as writing copy, designing advertisement layouts and co-ordinating outdoor campaigns. In terms of early twentieth-century British market and consumer cultures, UK advertising agencies were adapted to a fragmented market with strong differences between social classes, class-dominated regions and between cities and rural areas. Advertisement designers addressed consumers as readers of different types of publications rather than as a potentially uniform mass of consumers of standardised products. This system was challenged in the early 1920s by the rising influx of American consumer goods and American agencies into Britain: unlike their British competitors, who often subconsciously favoured the middle classes, American marketers focussed their campaigns (e.g. Libby’s Tinned Fruit, Palmolive soap, Sun-Maid Raisins) on the working class as mass consumers. In order to compare the marketing strategies chosen by British and American agencies for like goods, this paper uses the example of the American agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT) and its London branch since 1919 vis-à-vis its British competitors S. H. Benson’s, T. B. Browne and Mather & Crowther. In the mid-1920s, these agencies began to loose accounts (e.g. Horlicks, Rowntree) to JWT. While JWT employed the latest market research methods in order to find the most effective approach to address consumers as a mass of similar individuals with similar needs, most UK agencies still claimed their knowledge of the class structure of the British market as a clear performance differential over their American competitor agencies operating in London. In the paper I argue that the emergence of the mass market in Britain was not only influenced by the suspicion of British manufacturers and British advertising agencies alike of the simplification and standardisation of product lines. Moreover, the analysis presented here suggests a close connection between the question of mass marketing and the politics of class. The slow and belated discovery of the working-class mass consumer by British marketing experts was in part the outcome of what Ross McKibbin (1991; 1998) has described as the marginalisation of the working class by interwar British political culture."