Puffed up: corporate advertising. (its influence on business customers, employees, and opinion-formers such as investors)

Economist (US), The, March, 1998

A MAN'S hand reaches to turn on a General Electric lightbulb. A voice explains that this man, about to start work, invented the GE jet engine. That engine is flying a technician to an energy plant driven by a GE turbine, one powering a hospital where a little boy now clambers out of a GE medical scanner. Healthy, he skips off to a football game broadcast by satellites made and sent into space by GE. A GE train, carrying the satellites, rushes past a factory fitting a car bumper made from GE plastic. The car drives to the home of a child who is opening a GE-made fridge to get her father a juice. Work done, he turns off the light.

General Electric spends 40% of its $100m advertising budget on this kind of corporate advertising. Its "we bring good things to life"...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.