1927 Hupmobile Eight ad, emphasizing the car’s style and straight-eight engine. Photos courtesy Hagley Museum.
Designing cars and manufacturing them is only half the battle. To succeed in the industry, you’ve got to convince customers to buy them. This art of none-too-subtle persuasion is the topic of a new exhibition entitled “Driving Desire: Automobile Advertising and the American Dream,” soon to be presented by the Hagley Museum and Library in Greenville, Delaware.
1928 Packard Runabout ad.
If you’ve never read the works of Vance Packard or Marshall McLuhan, this show will demonstrate to you how advertising agencies and marketers convinced the public that they needed to buy new cars. It focuses on six themes they commonly used to create a sense of need among prospective customers: Luxury, economy, performance, style, patriotism and safety. Many of these remain effective automotive marketing tools today.
The 1959 Edsel Villager – perfect for the modern family.
The exhibits come from the vast collection of auto ads contributed to the Hagley by Z. Taylor Vinson, an attorney at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who was fanatically passionate about automotive literature of all kinds. The documents cover some 1,900 automotive manufacturers and span the years from 1893 through 2009.
The 1960 Corvair, with the ultimate marketing tool: the happy all-American family.
The exhibition opens October 2 and will remain accessible to the public for a year. For more information, visit Hagley.org.
