ABSTRACT
In the 1920s, when US advertisers and agencies brought research techniques to Britain, one commentator wrote of the new techniques, “Such research will include a study of the product, its purpose, the consumer, the trade, and general business conditions…firstly…to cut out, as far as possible, the gamble in advertising; secondly, to discover a definite objective; thirdly, to find the quickest way to that objective and to tie up the advertising to marketing distribution” (Bradshaw 1927:86). All aspects of planning, the marketing mix and the idea of targeting the consumer arose in this period. From as early as the 1920s books such as Claude Hopkins’s Scientific Advertising tried to make marketing and advertising into a professional discipline.
