VALUE OF ADVERTISING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20841, 7 April 1931, Page 9

VALUE OF ADVERTISING.

COUNTERACTING DEPRESSION SOME STRIKING INSTANCES. LONDON. April I. Business men throughout the world had been forced to study the economics of the depression, and a good many of them had formed the opinion that retrenchment in advertising was not necessarily economy, said Major J. J. Astor, in presiding at a meeting of the Advertising Benevolent Society. Naturally the newspapers would benefit from wider acceptance of that view, but the newspapers had no reason to be ashamed of advertisement activities, continued Major Astor. If it were not for their big displays, mass producers and great stores would be returning to the smithy and the pedlar's pack. (Laughter.) Advertising was the legitimate parent of goodwill. Pieduction of advertising meant loss of ground which would be costly to regain. Major Astor instanced a firm of American motor manufacturers which alone increased its advertising for 1930. It dropped only 14 per cent, of its business compared with the trade s average drop of 28 per cent. Lord Luke, a member of the council of the London Chamber of Commerce, had also not been afraid to implement his own theory that concentrated advertisement, by stimulating demand, would cause a rise in value out of all proportion to the expenditure, continued Major Astor. He believed that it could be firmly established that firms which kept up their advertising during the slump recovered more quickly than those which drastically cut their appropriations.