Published by H-Business and EH.Net (January, 1999)
Roland Marchand. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations
and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998. xi + 461 pp. Acknowledgments, illustrations, notes and
index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-08719-4.
Reviewed for H-Business and EH.Net by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, West Virginia
University
On January 11, 1999 Time Magazine devoted a special edition to the
future of medicine. This issue featured a series of striking full and double
page advertisements sponsored by the pharmaceutical firm, Pfizer. While some
of the company’s 39 pages of advertising promoted Pfizer’s products, ma ny of
the others were designed to create a favorable public image of the firm.
Through this institutional advertising, readers learned about Pfizer’s history,
its concern for women’s health, its innovative research programs and its
longstanding commitment
to service. Pfizer presented itself as a friend of the family and as an
institution dedicated to improving the life of each American. In each
institutional ad, the firm proclaimed that life not profits “is our life’s
work.” Having established its concern for the public, Pfizer shifted from
image-shaping institutional advertising to advocacy advertising, using one of
the issues’ back pages to editorialize against government-led reform of the
healthcare system. Only the free market, CEO William Steere
sermonized, could provide quality healthcare.
Pfizer’s efforts to associate its firm with technological progress and service
and its attack on government regulation have deep historical roots.
Roland Marchand’s study of the creation of the corporate image uncovers the
origins of many of the themes and images still used today by corporations like
Pfizer in their institutional and advocacy advertising campaigns. It is a
major contribution to the growing literature on the history of public
relations, consumer culture, and advertising. This meticulously researched
work draws upon the records of major corporations, advertising agencies and
public relations counselors to analyze the strategies big business used to
attain legitimacy by creating a favorable public image during the first half
of the twentieth century. It combines a survey of the activities of a broad
cross section of firms with in-depth case studies of major companies such as
AT&T, the Pennsylvania Railroad, General Motors, General Electric, Du Pont and
Metropolitan Life Insurance.
In the early twentieth century, large
corporations faced a “crisis of
legitimacy” (p. 3). Appalled at the growing power and corruption associated
with newly emergent big businesses and by increasing industrial strife,
elements of the public began calling for greater state regulation. Some even
demanded the dismantling of the “soulless” giants who seemed to endanger
democracy and the traditional American way of life. This threat to corporate
freedom helped give birth to a host of public relations initiatives, ranging
from welfare capitalism and institutional advertising,
to factory tours and elaborate exhibits at the great world’s fairs, all
designed to create a positive image of the corporation. Like Andrea To ne,
The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive
America, Cornell University Press, 1997), Marchand argues that welfare
capitalism, which provided services such as medical care, recreation,
pensions, and housing, was more than just a mechanism to undercut unionism and
promote worker productivity. By publicly demonstrating compassion for
employees and presenting the human face of American capitalism, welfare
programs served as a “safeguard against perceptions of soullessness” (p.1 5).
Welfarism also helped address corporate concern over the growing distance
between management and the rank and file, which Marchand labels
“the Lament.” The employee magazine, radio broadcasts, company films and
employee representation reunited “the family at one great dining table” (p.
113).
Much of the book is devoted to analyzing the evolution of institutional
advertising. Marchand used corporate records to reveal companies’ multiple
goals and multiple audiences. Metropolitan Life’s 1922 institutional
campaign, for instance, was aimed at both employees and the public. It sought
to shape political opinion, promote employee morale and corporate
consciousness, and develop for the insurance company a reputation for community
service. Similarly, General Motor’s 1920s advertising campaign aspired both to
create public goodwill by portraying GM as an agency of public service and to
stimulate a corporate consciousness among the often hostile divisions of the
firm. Marchand pays close attention to the language and visual imagery of the
ads themselves. This book lavishly reproduced almost two hundred of these
advertisements, both color and black-and-white. While some of the advertising
seems archaic, many of the themes and metaphors that Marchand identified have
become ubiquitous in modern-day institutional advertising. Early ads projected
the corporate image through architecture, using pictures of the factory or
corporate headquarters to symbolize qualities like stability, efficiency, and
security.
More familiar, however, are the AT&T ads from the early part of the century.
A trailblazer in corporate public relations, AT&T advertisements identified the
telephone with economic progress, featured women, sought to humanize the
company, and emphasized
the firm’s commitment to public service.
In the midst of the depression of the thirties, corporations worried less about
their soulless image and more about the future of capitalism.
Competing with the New Deal for public favor, business attempted to se ll
itself and the capitalist system. It looked to new mediums, especially radio
and movies, and reached out to insurgent workers with a common-folk style. New
converts, like Du Pont and U.S. Steel became committed to the mission of
carrying their “corporate message directly to the American
public” (p. 223). Other firms, like General Motors, longtime advocates of
public relations, expanded their image building activities. GM’s striking 1939
World’s Fair exhibit, Futurama, helped convey “the corporation’
s optimism about the capacity of private industry to promote prosperity and
create new jobs,” and suggested the “modernity, benevolence, and
forward-looking social vision of the corporation” (p. 303). World War II saw
yet a further expansion of corporate
public relations as companies connected their images to the war effort and
fought to offset growing wartime regulation of the economy.
In the early part of Creating the Corporate Soul, Marchand offers an
intriguing analysis of the roles of gender and
shifting boundaries in the development of corporate imagery. As he explains,
public relations and welfare capitalism, which were distant from production and
catered to public opinion, were initially viewed as feminine and potentially
subversive.
Gender
considerations shaped the content of ads. Uncomfortable with too
“feminine” an appeal, AT&T’s early institutional advertising shied away from
depicting the social role of the telephone. Welfare capitalism also pushed the
boundaries of conventional business behavior, creating expectations of
stewardship that firms were often hesitant to assume. The themes of gender and
boundaries appear, however, only in the first part of the book. One might have
wished for an extension of this promising analysis through the entire work.
Throughout, Marchand makes realistic appraisals of the corporate image building
campaigns. Many of the corporate assertions were hypocritical,
contradictory and down right false. Firms, for instance, commonly employed the
metaphor of
corporation as family. But, as Marchand observes, “what family would ‘fire’
its children when expediency so dictated?” (p. 107). AT
&T’s depiction of itself as an investment democracy was deceptive.
Similarly, the sit-down strikes made GM’s 1930s portrayals of employees happily
rushing to work hardly credible. Marchand acknowledges that the
“precise effect of institutional advertising campaigns was difficult to
estimate” (p. 201). Companies with political goals at times found the payoff
in favorable
legislation. In the 1930s professional polling services began surveying
popular attitudes toward large firms. They helped provide business the
necessary evidence of the effectiveness of corporate image building. By the
end of World War II, big business
had gained acceptance as a legitimate social institution and corporate
ideology was well on its way to becoming a dominate force in political
discourse.
Roland Marchand died before Creating Corporate Soul was published. It
is an important work and a
beautiful book that will stand as a fitting tribute to his distinguished career
as a historian.