Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/13

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The Science of Advertising
9

commencing their buying today, cannot name—anything else but advertised goods. This girl might have said, as her mother had had to say when she first bought things for herself a third of a century before, "bring me some oatmeal, some chocolate, some scouring soap, some flour," and so on. But it is not natural for a girl of today to do that. She never sees "some oats," but ten thousand times and everywhere "Quaker Oats"; the merits of "some chocolate" has never been brought to her, but a thousand times she has been idly convinced of the superiority of "Baker's"; scouring soap never naturally occurs to her anonymously, but naturally and easily in inseparable connection with "Sapolio"; and when she hesitates about flour, can it be over any other alternative than Pillsbury's or Washburn-Crosby's?

For this girl is only one of the class of the millions today who, as we have progressed, have been kept from all direct knowledge of any sort of meal, chocolate, soap, flour or other family supplies—except that which the advertisements have furnished her ubiquitously. And she not only names them naturally, but she can actually not name anything else when she orders them. For twenty-four years—I mean for eighteen, if she began to read at six—the advertised brand and the article were carefully and continuously associated together for her and associated, too,