Recently finished The Hidden Persuaders – a classic from the late ’50s, when America was leading the way towards advertising that said more than ‘Buy this! It’s Great!’

Much of it now reads like ‘the bleedin’ obvious’; some of it is genuinely quite disturbing; but it’s full of nice little nuggets, like this trio:

A Milwaukee advertising executive commented on the fact that women will pay two dollars and a half for skin cream but no more than twenty-five cents for a cake of soap. Why? Soap, he explained, only promises to make them clean. The cream promises to make them beautiful.

Vance Packard

‘People have a terrific loyalty to their brand of cigarette and yet in tests cannot tell it from other brands. They are smoking an image.’

NY ad agency research director

And one right on the current nose:

‘The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal …is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.’

Adlai Stevenson