Interesting article re Stetson Advertising

[jimmy the lid]

Here it is...


Cheers,
JtL

 

[Lefty]

I think we need to get Indycop to take a road trip to Stetson U. to do some research. We can all throw in lots of quarters for the millions of copies we'll need.

 

[jimmy the lid]

Way to go, Lefty!

One of the interesting aspects of the article is the discussion of Stetson's centralized national marketing campaign that focused on a particular hat (or hats, methinks) in any given year. That explains a lot of what we are seeing in vintage Stetson ads, and why certain models seem to get little or no ad treatment.

Another interesting point is that, prior to Stetson initiating the national campaign, local hatters were free to create their own ad copy with no review by Stetson -- something to keep in mind in terms of using these local ads as sources of info (the recent "Medalist" discussion comes to mind).

Cheers,
JtL

 

[Lefty]

I would think that the store ads would be distinguishable from the company ads. Wouldn't the name of the store be in an ad placed by the store? I wouldn't want to advertise for Stetson unless I was advertising that I had the best quality and widest variety of Stetsons at my store. Plus, I think that many of the ads we see are from Life or some other national publication. I don't know how many stores, if any, would have been big enough to want to advertise to a national audience. In terms of newspapers and smaller publications, though, I can see how store ads would create confusion.

 

[jimmy the lid]

Right -- the Stetson national campaign resulted in those vintage ads we see from Life magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, etc, and generally follow the format identified in the article. I think that the newspaper ads that RBH has posted in several threads are good examples of the kind of local advertising that preceded Stetson's national campaign.

Cheers,
JtL

 

[carter]

Lefty, I believe you are correct about the store owner identifying their store in the local advertising. This is particularly true when we consider that, according to the article, the only store to sell the Stetson brand exclusively was their store in Philadelphia.
The stores selling Stetsons throughout the nation would have been selling other brands as well. This is where a national marketing campaign by Stetson would have helped their (Stetson's) sales even in a city where the local hat shop may have had good business, albeit not in Stetson hats exclusively.

 

[Don Dahlberg]

As I talked about in another thread, I have been going through old New York Times newspapers. Several hat stores advertised several times a month. B. Altman seemed to advertise every week in the 30s and Young's Hat Stores advertised a couple times a month from the 30s through the 50s. These are just Stetson advertisement. They are not as nice to look at as the Stetson advertisements in the big magazines, but they are more informative. They featured many styles, colors, and ribbon choices. You can follow style changes over the years. For example, in the fall of 1936 they announced that brims are getting larger and the heights of the hats are getting shorter. In the early 40s they talked about stocking as many as seven brim sizes so they could match the hat to your face. In the late 40s and early 50s, this was down to five brim sizes. They also described how their sales people were expert at "finger blocking", what this board calls "bashing", again to match your face. They names several finger blocking styles. I am sorry I have no way to post these on your board.

Don