That admirable emporium John Lewis has pursued a policy in recent years of letting out its sales areas to franchises with well-known brand names, so that in the middle of a large branch you search in vain for the name of John Lewis itself. This seems a pity, and is surely a marketing mistake. Why give free publicity to rivals?
But on a recent visit to one of the largest branches, I noticed that all outlets, regardless of brand, were promoting a sale of their summer clothing. For this exercise a single sign sufficed for all: the simple word ‘Sale.’ Not ‘Sale’ but ‘Sale.’ – the word followed by a conspicuous full stop. That full stop took me back several decades.
There was a memorable moment in the ’70s when advertisers in both Britain and America suddenly started to print their slogans with a full stop, or as the Americans call it, a ‘period’. I suspected that the fashion originated in New York, and took to calling the phenomenon the Madison Avenue Period, after the sector of New York where advertising companies were, in those days, thick on the ground.
The Madison Avenue Period lasted for a decade or two, then disappeared. I wasn’t aware of much comment at the time, but it was a significant moment in the history of advertising. That simple punctuation mark transformed every slogan into a statement, a proposition inviting the response ‘this is true’. A group of words without a full stop may be celebratory or decorative, but can possess no logical weight. The punctuation endows it with importance, with grammatical coherence, constitutes a sort of challenge to refute it. I found the already oppressive ubiquity of advertising more crushing when it consisted so often of this kind of quietly bullying assertion.
Nowadays, the hidden persuaders are slightly more subtle. Advertising strategies are more varied, and less reliant on short, snappy slogans. (You know, I expect, that ‘slogan’ is a Scots Gaelic word and means the war-cry of a Highland clan.) We are cajoled and enticed rather than bullied or challenged. We’re drawn into conspiratorial agreement, and current concerns regarding say, climate change or homelessness invoked to conjure a humanitarian basis for that agreement. In other words, advertising is more politicised than it used to be. In a recent newspaper, I spot a high street bank using this sly insinuation: ‘Everyone needs a safe place to call home’ – which might well have ended with a period, but doesn’t. It’s a comfortable, humane assertion no-one would want to contest.
Now the plain word ‘Sale’, with a large full stop placed after it, looks rather belligerent. We find ourselves asking: Is this an instruction? Why does the fact that there’s a sale on need such redundant underlining? The word alone without the period would inform customers of the sale; the full stop forces that fact on us with double emphasis. We may not object, but we should be conscious that punctuation is being manipulated to influence us.
I’ll be interested to see if that unexpected full stop turns out to be a straw in the wind, and we enter another ‘Madison Avenue Period’ in the mid-2020s.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life
