ABSTRACT
German companies were said to be focused on production and quality and nineteenth-century German entrepreneurs like Werner von Siemens voiced their disdain for advertising, for example, as an unnecessary and even frivolous burden on a company’s budget. Marketing, it was long held, did not play an important role in the development of business and the economy in Germany. Many German economists at the end of the nineteenth century were highly critical towards consumption which was widely regarded as a ‘destruction of value’ rather than a satisfaction of needs. Any discussion of marketing in 1930s Germany needs to acknowledge the proximity of inter-war commercial practices to the political propaganda of the Nazi state. Some have gone so far as to call Joseph Goebbels a political ‘brand technician’ in the sense of Domizlaff’s Markentechnik and both, indeed, drew heavily on the mass psychology of Gustave le Bon.
