REPETITIVE CONSUMPTION & BRANDING.
Before mass production became a universal term in the 1950s, businessmen worried about over-production - they wanted to avoid it by selling more and not producing less. As the economy changed to machine-driven industry, it came to light that manufacturers could produce more goods than they could sell.
50 years later, King Champ Gillette ( the inventor of the disposable razor ) considered overproduction to be America's biggest problem stating that:
"We have the paradox of idle men, only too anxious for work, and idle plants in perfect conditions for production, at the same time that people are starving and frozen. The reason is overproduction. It seems a bit absurd that when we have overproduced we should go without. One would think that overproduction would warrant a furious holiday and a riot of feasting and display of all the superfluous goods lying around. On the contrary, overproduction produces want."As manufacturers thought about solutions to this dilemma they decided that the problem was twofold. The first problem was demand - creating it and sustaining it. The next was distribution - moving goods quickly and cheaply to consumers. From the late 19th century onwards the problem was confronted through the development of highways and cheap freight on railways.
While retailers developed their distribution networks, manufacturers tackled their lack of demand by developing marketing campaigns. Advertising played a huge role here, but the manufacturers puzzled on what they should advertise about their goods. This was before consumer advertisements became effective in creating demand for a product, the product first had to become different from similar goods.
A good example of this was Uneeda Biscuits. Their goal was to create a need for repetitive consumption of their product by consumers to relieve overproduction. In 1899 the National Biscuit company, makers of Uneeda biscuit, began to feature its patented In-Er-Seal packaging in a national ad campaign to create demand for their product. Before this, people would buy their biscuits in bulk from an open barrel in their local shop. National Biscuit emphasised that their packaging prevented moisture from ruining the quality and flavour of their biscuits. They supported this with a graphic that depicted a boy in a yellow rain coat pushing a wheelbarrow full of biscuit boxes home in the rain. Eventually the boy became the mascot that appeared on all of Uneeda biscuit's packaging and customers started to ask for the biscuits by name. They had successfully created enough demand to guarantee repetitive consumption.
Branding has become a good solution to stop overproduction and create repetitive demand. It gave customers a direct relationship between them and the company they bought goods from. Wrigley's, the American Tobacco Company and Procter & Gamble all adopted similar tactics to gain product loyalty amongst their customers even before the Uneeda campaign. They all designed strong national advertising campaigns not just to identify their branding but also to provide guarantees of quality. These guarantees were needed for early packaged products as many customers were suspicious of any goods that they could test or taste.
Modern packaging, with trademarks and identifying logos, guaranteed to the customer a consistency in quality therefore being safe for them to buy. As these products were being distributed nationally, brand names assured customers of an equitable value for money exchange at any store in the country.
Christine Frederick observed in 1919 that:
"The one means of protection the consumer can rely on is the 'trademark' on the package or the product she buys... In every case, the trademarked brand carries more integrity or guarantee."This truly defined the start of an era where customers were comfortable with branding and even made loyalties to them.
Bibliography
Slade, G. (2006). 'Made to break'. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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