Abstract
One of Helen Lansdowne’s protégées, Margaret “Peggy” King, said in an interview that Lansdowne “encouraged me to rent paintings and sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, to have very good clothes, to work with top decorators at home and in the office.”1 Lansdowne had a proprietary air concerning her group of women and gave them advice on everything from writing copy to managing their homes. This interest in style that extended beyond the walls of J. Walter Thompson (JWT), hints at Lansdowne’s strongly held belief that how one approached style and art permeated all aspects of life. Her attitude toward high art illustrates two interconnected points: (1) she was fluid in the language and attitude of social mobility (a female Horatio Alger character, in effect, a Ragged Jane), and (2) she cultivated style and taste by identifying the proper art (high art) to revere as being the domain of the upper class, closely linked herself to that art, and stressed the importance of that art to her staff. Perhaps Lansdowne had a particularly developed sense of the appeal of social prestige because she had worked so hard to lift herself out of the poverty she experienced as a child. This understanding and ambition would have contributed to the highly effective psychological appeal of social prestige used in the Pond’s testimonial ad campaigns. Viewed another way, after Lansdowne improved her fortunes, she was very willing to entice others with ambition that success and status were one and the same.
It is estimated that every second of every hour, there is a woman somewhere in the world buying a Pond’s product. The cosmetic industry has grown tremendously in the past 50 years and Pond’s has kept pace with this growth, often breaking new ground and setting new trends and standards, for the entire industry.
—William M. Peniche, “Beauty From Bangor to Bangkok: A Brief Review of Chesebrough-Pond’s World-Wide Advertising,” a presentation before an international seminar, April 18, 1961, Sam Meek Papers, JWT Archives, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina
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Notes
Juliann Sivulka, Stronger Than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising Personal Hygiene in America, 1875–1940 (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 137. As early as 1904, Walter D. Scott’s article “The Psychology of Advertising,” which appeared in the Atlantic, called attention to the method of using this softer selling style—a style that used suggestion or association to convey the impression of integrity, quality, and prestige. Scott’s writings on this topic were compiled in The Theory and Practice of Advertising and The Psychology of Advertising.
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marian Boyers, 1979).
Historian Grace Elizabeth Hale explores the making of whiteness in the South and shows how the creation of modern whiteness was taken up by the rest of the country (beginning in the 1920s) as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while, at the same time, creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998). The ad men and ad women at JWT, however, were contributing to this social hierarchy prior to the 1920s.
William O’Barr, Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), ix.
John Uri Lloyd and John Thomas Lloyd, “History of Hamamelis (Witch Hazel), Extract and Distillate,” Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association 14, no. 3 (March 1935): 220–24.
Geoffrey Jones, Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Christine Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party, 1910–1928 (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 7–8.
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar (New York: Henry Holt, 1998).
Simone Weil Davis, Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 81.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1964; reprint, New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 100. Similarly, JWT management claims a consumer universality in justifying its international expansion, which has a certain resonance with Marx’s claim that the capitalist class represents its interests as universal.
See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), 64.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prisons Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971).
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© 2009 Denise H. Sutton
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Sutton, D.H. (2009). Selling Prestige and Whiteness. In: Globalizing Ideal Beauty. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100435_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100435_4
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