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I’m in the midst of yet another great book — “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are” by Rob Walker of The New York Times. On page 96, I cam across Walker’s interesting summary of a particular article:

“[Consumers] are banding together, becoming ‘better educated and better organized,’ with a ‘growing familiarity with the mechanics of advertising’ and the endless range of gimmicky sales tactics. They have ’suffered from deceptive and stupid advertising’ long enough, and it is only inevitable that power would shift to them in an economy that has moved from scarcity to abundance. ‘These changes,’ the article summarized, ‘have tended to make consumers more critical and to enhance their importance’.”

Sound familiar? I bet it does; we’ve been reading the same basic message in the ad trade journals for several years, at least. Well, as it turns out, the article quoted above was in the Harvard Business Review. In 1939!

The more things change, the more the stay the same?