Customer Reviews

Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business

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This is an interesting work in business and cultural history. Roland Marchand documents the way corporations used (and developed) public relations to develop images of themselves in the public mind. This is really about the early decades and is quite fascinating. We see this today, certainly. For example, when some huge food conglomerate shows you some master chef each portion of the food they want you to buy, you are getting the same kind of treatment. It wouldn't do to show you the huge machines and food production lines that create these food products in vast quantities. No, they want you to think in terms of some impossibly personalized image. (Although recently I saw a television commerical for a breakfast cereal showing the machines making and packaging the food with some of the folks making it talking to the viewer about how great their product is.)

While some may feel the author of the book is more hostile to corporations than is actually appropriate, I think he has done a fine job in presenting us with these historical images and insightful text that supports his thesis. I am certainly pro-business and conservative. However, I in no way want to pretend that corporations are caring and personal entities that have objects other than providing profits for their shareholders at heart. There are a great many philosophical issues that can be discussed about the duties of corporations, and I am willing to engage in those debates, but no one should mistake these entities for families or friends (or monsters or enemies, either). Corporations are artificial creations that we have created to provide goods and services efficiently and thereby returning profits to shareholders. This book documents how they create images that help them accomplish those purposes.

This book does a nice job of taking a dry subject and presenting it in an interesting way. It is nice reading about different companies "adventures" in advertising. I specifically liked the phone companies story and its attempt to avoid being labeled a monopoly. It is worth your time if you are interested in advertising, but is a rather dense read.