in Final Project

To Bauhaus & Beyond: Sach Plakat

It’s pretty funny how everything comes back in a full circle. Just like fashion, the trends come and go, often making appearances or renaissances (ie. Matching clothing sets and Birkenstocks) in later years. Similarly, in the advertising industry, product messaging recycles its messaging in a cyclical fashion. Product promotion can take on the emphasis on an association with a product, be it lifestyle, societal status, historical or cultural. Messaging in product promotion can also go the other way and to take on a product-based messaging.

This was a poster published by Coca-Cola in the 1890’s as a cough medicine. In the poster, a well-dressed lady who seems to be living comfortably (as seen from the blooming, decorative flowers in the pot on an embellished table lined with cloth) and is seen to be consuming the “ideal brain tonic”. This gives the subtle messaging that if one drinks coca-cola, he or she will be healthy and will fare well in life.

Likewise, in this poster that is promoting a liqueur, attests that the liqueur is so good that it can entice a monk to drink from it and to even get him addicted, despite his religious beliefs.

Whereas, in the 1910s, advertising seemed to have pared on the messaging and to focus solely on the product as seen from Lucien Bernhard’s “Manoli’ Sach Plakat poster. Perhaps, this was information fatigue at the end of the consumer, in which consumers have been bombarded by so much advertising tactics that in turn, they opt for brands are that straight-to-the-point and no-frills hence the production of object-based posters created by Bernhard.

Evidently, today advertising is back to product messaging uses association. Perhaps, in a couple of decades to come, consumers would opt for messaging that is less flamboyant and straight-forward.