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begin.” Peter Wicklow set up the easel, and placed the first of the charts on it. Donald said, “P.A. wants me to tell you about Foundation Soap.”
    “Well, go on. Do it,” P.A. said.
    Foundation Soap had only been on the market two years. It was made and sold by Pettifer’s, a small firm that did most of its business in proprietary medicines. Consequently Foundation Soap was outside the control of the three colossi who between them manufactured most of the soaps and washing powders to be found in the shops. Although small, Pettifer’s was what is called “old-established”; it had excellent distribution among chemists all over the country, and a good reputation in the trade. The firm had begun in the nineteen-twenties by supplying standard unbranded items like aspirin, yeast and sulphur tablets, which chemists could bottle under their own labels, and had gone on slowly toproduce a range of branded products which sold steadily, if not particularly quickly, chiefly because they were “ethicals”—which means that you could not buy them without a doctor’s prescription, so that they were not advertised except in the medical magazines. In 1952 Pettifer’s had bought up a declining firm which had once sold cosmetics, but was by then reduced to a single product, a bubble bath called Desire Me. Supported by an occasional quarter-page advertisement in the women’s weeklies and put out to all the chemists who already bought from Pettifer’s, Desire Me settled down to a steady, if unspectacular, rate of sale, and Pettifer’s directors began to look about for something else; the Desire Me organization, they felt, was not being used as fully as it might be. They had no wish to re-enter the market for cosmetics; it would be easier to try something new. So Pettifer’s had consulted its Agency, and that Agency had mounted a research, and out of it all came Foundation Soap, which was not exactly a cosmetic, and not exactly a soap, and certainly not a patent medicine, but had done very well for Pettifer’s just the same.
    Advertising has not been a profession very long, but already, among the older, toping generation, among the directors of some of the smaller agencies growing senile together in golfing suburbia, there is talk of the good old days. All the successes of advertising in the good old days, they would tell you, were sudden flashes— advertisements printed upside down, pages left almost entirely white, slogans which swept the people into the shops where they bought and bought and bought again, puns which passed into the public language. Perhaps that was so once, and those who see the Agency as a wilfully malevolent force which corrupts men, leading them like sheep always into a deeper slavery, certainly like to believe it. But success stories nowadays are seldom so simple ; the flash is not so sudden. Agencies begin with facts. If an old product is in decline, its Agency must discover why the people who used to buy it are doing so no longer, and whether other people, who have never bought it, might now be induced to do so. If a new product is to be produced, it will be fashioned out of what people like and dislike about other products of the same general nature; before you can undertake the expense of making something, and marketing it, you have to be sure that people will want what you have made—and they cannot be made to want it unless there is something in them which does want it, whether they know it or not. So that, long before anyone has begun to devise advertisements, the Market Researchers of an Agency have been as busy as mice in houses and shops, asking questions and tabulating answers, and burrowing below the surface of those answers to discover whether anything is meant which has not been said. Then, out of all the people in the country, you will know how many of them are in the market for your product, and for what reasons they may buy it. Now the Media Department of your Agency must determine