Selling the Dream Why Advertising Is Good Business

Subjects:

• Business » Marketing, Advertising, Sales
• Business » Business History

Reviews:

• Hood provides a fascinating look into the world of advertising and beyond to support his view that advertising provides a societal good: it promotes freedom of choice, competition, and innovation. As written by Hood, the evolution of advertising is quite an interesting journey. Although advertising is generally regarded as a modern phenomenon, the author traces the growth of promotion and commerce back to cobblers in Babylonia who hung shoes on their shop doors 5,000 years ago. Merchants of ancient Rome used such advertising techniques as pictures, brand names, and slogans to differentiate their wares. Each century has added its own stamp to the art of advertising, with town criers, handbills, newspapers, radio, and television all providing new ways to reach successive generations of consumers. Hood notes that no less an advertiser than Benjamin Franklin used advertising to differentiate his famous stove from others that "would damage the eyes ... and shrivel the skin." He examines a wide range of advertising topics, including conspicuous consumption, product health claims, and economic and societal factors. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate and graduate marketing students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners, as well as anyone interested in advertising.
  —Choice April 2006
• Consultant and journalist Hood reacts to how Americans feel in general about advertising by reminding them that marketing fulfills desires and demand while increasing profits and often making or breaking whole businesses and industries. Along with very well-chosen (and very funny) examples of how Americans feel and deal with advertising as represented in popular culture. Hood is brutally honest about why some may perceive advertising as a trail of lies, showing that in fact the industry is held to a rather strict set of standards and tends to react to that same consumer desire and demand that helps to define it.
  —Reference & Research Book News February 2006

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Introduction
• The Birth of Advertising and Commercial Culture
• A Carnival of Conspicuous Consumption
• Broadcasting Revolution, Advertising Evolution
• The New Economics and Science of Advertising
• Living the Commercial Life
• Health Claims and the Problem of Fraud
• Advertising and the Consuming Child
• The Economics and Ethics of Selling Sin
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index