ABSTRACT
Taken from an American advertising textbook of 1916, and appealing to and for a type of sexual differentiation reinforced and promoted by the expansion of marketing on both sides of the Atlantic during this period, this quotation still has a recognisable air. A vulnerable collective victim, ‘the sex’ with its special ‘foibles’, is targeted by a quasi-militaristic masculine offensive, ‘his campaign’. In this case, the author in fact goes on to suggest that the sex’s particular foibles are the result of occupational differences, rather than being natural; he does not, for instance, suggest that marketing is only directed to or against women, who are simply a particular case of an object that might be any group. But in any case, the mutability of a sex’s foibles, and the fact that foibles are not confined to one sex, is no obstacle, rather providing unlimited possibilities for successful operations and conquests on the part of ‘the advertiser’ whose sole concern is the maximisation of profit, ‘to secure the largest returns’. Marketing doesn’t depend in principle on feminine foibles, as opposed to any others, but it has generally done pretty well out of the kind of fruitful engagement suggested by the offering of ‘strictly women’s propositions’.
