Roland Marchand

File:Person.jpg

Title

Biography

Roland Marchand (1933 – 15 November 1997) was an American historian, professor of history at the University of California, Davis, from 1961 until his death. He was a specialist in American cultural and business history and an unusually celebrated teacher; UC Davis named a graduate fellowship after him.

Advertising the American Dream

Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (University of California Press, 1985) is the standard history of the formative period of American advertising, and one of the books that made advertising a legitimate object for serious historians.

Marchand's central insight is a caution about evidence. Advertisements, he argues, are not a mirror of how people lived; they are far too skewed toward the affluent, the urban and the young for that. They are better understood as a social tableau — a picture of how the advertising profession imagined its audience wanted to see itself. That makes them excellent evidence for the aspirations, anxieties and self-image of a period, and very poor evidence for its material conditions, and the distinction is one that historians using advertising had frequently failed to make.

The book documents the profession's own account of its work: the "great parables" of American advertising in the period — the Parable of the First Impression, of the Democracy of Goods, of Civilization Redeemed, of the Captivated Child — which Marchand identifies as the recurring narrative structures through which advertisers reconciled mass production with individual dignity. He also gives close attention to the advertisers themselves as a professional class, anxious about their own status, positioning themselves as "apostles of modernity" who would guide a bewildered public through a new material world.

Creating the Corporate Soul

Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (University of California Press, 1998), published posthumously, addresses a related problem. Large corporations in the early twentieth century faced a legitimacy crisis: they were legally persons but visibly not human, enormous, impersonal, and widely distrusted. The book traces the deliberate construction of a corporate personality — through institutional advertising, world's fair pavilions, welfare programmes, house organs and public relations — as a response to that distrust. AT&T, General Motors, General Electric and others set out to give an abstraction a face and a conscience.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Marchand's social tableau is a general method for reading any promotional image, including the product launch, the demo video and the app store screenshot. None of these show how anyone actually uses a device; they show how the industry imagines the user wishes to be seen, which makes them primary evidence for the culture of the makers rather than of the users.

Creating the Corporate Soul has aged into unexpected relevance. The problem it describes — an impersonal entity manufacturing a personality in order to be trusted — is the problem now being solved by brand voices, founder mythologies and conversational interfaces. The techniques have changed; the legitimacy deficit has not.

Related Reading

• Robert Goldman
• Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising
• Thorstein Veblen
• John Berger
• Charisma