Extending the communication process: the significance of personal influencers in UK motor markets

It has been common practice among members of the advertising community to talk of there having been fashions for particular styles of advertising at different times, but little work has been carried out to investigate the substance of this belief. To evaluate this ‘fashion’ proposition, usage levels were measured for 56 variables in 2,208 advertisements over a 46-year period in magazines from four countries; the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The findings indicated that there had been a tendency for systematic variations in the frequencies of usage in many of the variables measured. The general form of these variations was of cyclical movements about an underlying long-term trend, which were observable for all types of variable studied. While the underlying trends often appeared to reflect developments in the wider society, the cyclical variations appeared to be self-sustaining and largely independent of outside forces. Such behaviour is consistent with the ‘fashion’ hypothesis.