“Advertise More In Recession”

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31499, 13 October 1967, Page 14

“Advertise More In Recession”

“If you really want to help a recession into a depression, cut back on your advertising; if you think advertising makes people over-commit themselves on unnecessary purchasing, cut it out and don’t let people know what goods, services, and best buys may be found”, said Professor S. H. Britt, yesterday.

Professor Britt, a psychologist and professor of marketing in the Graduate School of Business Administration at Northwestern University, Chicago, arrived in Christchurch yesterday. Professor Britt a world authority in his field, is here to conduct a seminar today for the Association of Accredited Advertising Agencies of New Zealand, the New Zealand Institute of Management and Sales and Marketing Executives International. Professor Britt was asked whether there was any justification for reducing advertising in New Zealand's economic situation.

Many people did this because it was easier than cutting back on staff or cutting wages, he said. Ideally the reverse should be done. The marketing effort should be increased and unproductive staff reduced.

The costs of advertising in newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting were increasing so that a percentage Of previous sales bought less publicity, said Professor Britt. Professor Britt was told of various Christchurch discus-

sion groups which had suggested that advertising was unhealthily persuasive and encouraged over-spending. “That idea springs, I think, from Vance Packard’s book ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ but I answered it with my book ‘The Spenders’,” he replied. “It is completely false to suggest that the spender, the consumer, is a poor, unintelligent, manipulated puppet which can be twisted at will. Today the average man and his wife and family are knowledgeable, discriminating and thrifty and no amount of advertising will persuade them to do what they do not want to do,” said Professor Britt.

Through advertising they learned what regular, new and bargain goods and services were available. The one great lesson the American public learned from recent newspaper strikes was their dependence on newspapers. Without them they found that no other media could, so well, inform them in news or advertising because they could study and compare the written word most easily. Professor Britt said Northwestern University, Stanford, Chicago, Tulane, Columbia and Harvard insisted that graduates only be admitted to their business schools and only about 300 out of hundreds of applicants were admitted. The two-year fulltime courses were not technological but broadly based on production, marketing, and finance.

An evening division at Northwestern catered for more mature men who could take two or three units a year over five or six years but the teachers and the degrees were the same as in the fulltime course.

Professor Britt had talks yesterday on the University of Canterbury plan for a chair of business administration.