That the automobile business has been the most extensively advertised business of any in which we are engaged, almost anyone will concede from knowledge gained from his own observation.
Advertising is like the rainbow—many hued. It may be one form, or it may be another. It may whisper, or it may shout. We must concede that the advertising the automobile promoters have done was more largely of the shouting than the whispering kind. That is not to their discredit—rather otherwise. The distinct injunction to advertise is contained in the Bible. It was: “To so let your good work shine that,” etc., and the people of scriptural days were admonished not to hide their light under a bushel.
Newspapers are said, somewhat carelessly, to have made the automobile business. It is not exactly fair to make this statement so sweepingly. They did for it a good deal more than they did for any other line of industry, and are still doing it.
They never devoted the space that they gave to the automobile to railroads, steamboats, the telephone, street railways, oil, lumber, mining, meat packing, or any other commercial industry. It was not, necessarily, that the automobile manufacturers, in all cases, asked for this liberal treatment by the newspapers.
It was that newspapers volunteered it. One started it, and others followed. The spell which the idea contained in the automobile weaves over men and women was cast equally over the editors and publishers in the United States. In recognition of the novelty of the automobile, they laid liberal offerings of free space on the altar of motordom. Its peculiar exhilaration penetrated the editorial sanctum, and in this distinctive exhilaration the automobile has had no parallel except in golf.
It has been quite generally accepted as an axiom that if you give, you receive. We see this statement proved in a hundred ways. A pleasant smile begets a smile. A good deed is matched in kind. No better reason for this exists, probably, than that it is ingrained in us to hate to be under obligations to anybody. So when we get a smile we promptly pay it back and are square, just as we invite to lunch a man who invited us to lunch. We are very particular about this.
The automobile manufacturers were not lacking in this trait, common to human nature. When publishers put their stamp of approval on the motor car and unreservedly threw open their columns to the progress made in its improvements and production, manufacturers appreciated and reciprocated.
The result has been that more money has been spent in advertising in the automobile business in the United States than has been spent in any other single line of enterprise. Possibly the nearest approach to it has been patent medicine, or the promotion of various enterprises.
And it has paid—every automobile maker, and every salesman will admit this as a matter of course. They will admit it because they know it to be so—a knowledge derived in their own experience.
The psychology of advertising shows that there are two principal things involved in making advertising profitably productive. One is that it informs, the other that it persuades. If the mind is informed of what an automobile is, what it does, and all the advantages and benefits it confers, it has a basis to work on, and from this working basis it will evolve conclusions.