Branding Trust

"""Why would anyone trust an advertisement? Why, especially, in the long nineteenth century when novel products and media entered rapidly growing markets from unfamiliar sources? Jennifer M. Black probes these and other questions in Branding Trust, the most significant study of American advertising history in a generation. Masterful insights follow from her immense and innovative research to explain how pioneers in print advertising designed imagery to convey their trustworthiness and legitimacy. Through her rare appreciation for the interplay of evolving media, markets, courts, and diverse cultures, Black explains and generously illustrates the history of advertising’s visual rhetoric."" * Pamela Walker Laird, author of Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing * ""Jennifer Black recasts our understanding of how American capitalism came to rest so powerfully on corporate brands. That process involved a century of experimentation by manufacturers, merchants, advertising firms, and publishers, all of whom wrestled with the moral economy of competition, the legal boundaries of fraud, and the underpinnings of consumer trust amid industrialization. The establishment of reputations for quality, Black shows, was bound up as much with debates over gender roles and racial hierarchies as it was with technological advances, inventiveness in graphic design, and efforts to track consumer response to ad campaigns."" * Edward J. Balleisen, author of Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff *"