Fraiche Style: A02 Longer Post

This is the post for Assignment 02: Designer Investigation. To begin this post I must first issue a disclaimer. The individual who I chose to research and write about is not exactly a designer per se, but he did design something that is of great personal interest to me, and something that had an enormous impact on America as a whole. While it may appear initially that I veered from the assignment at hand I think you will find that if you read this post in its entirety you will have a much better understanding regarding why I chose this individual and how it applies to design.

The individual I chose to research for this post is Neil H. McElroy. Hopefully you have not heard of him, as he is definitely not going to appear on any type of "Top 100" Designers list. During his early years, McElroy received a bachelor's in economics from Harvard. Later in his life Neil became the 6th United States Secretary of Defense. Prominent as they are, neither of these achievements are the reason that I chose to research and write about McElroy.

In 1931, as a young man working for P&G on an advertising campaign for Camay Soap, Neil McElroy changed the face of marketing across the United States when he drafted what became known as the McElroy memo. This memo outlined and eventually led to the creation of brand management, a concept that began at P&G and eventually spread to every Consumer Goods company in America (and arguably the entire world).

While working on the advertising campaign for Camay soap, "McElroy became frustrated with having to compete not only with soaps from Lever and Palmolive, but also with Ivory, P&G's own flagship product." In the memo McElroy argued that more focused attention should be paid to each of P&G's brands individually. Each brand should have a person in charge of that brand, as well as a team of individuals devoted to thinking about every aspect of marketing it. He stated that this team should be dedicated to one brand and it alone. To this end, the concern of these managers would be their individual brand, which should be marketed as if it were a separate business. The effect of this would be that, "In ad campaigns, Camay and Ivory would be targeted to different consumer markets, and therefore would become less competitive with each other."

McElroy's memo gave birth to the modern system of brand management used in economies around the world. In essence he designed the experience that every consumer has with the products they buy, sell, and interact with on a daily basis. Although he may not have been a designer by trade, he is responsible for the creation of one of the most influential strategies of Industry.

The importance of McElroy and his formation of the practice of brand management is important for the development of design for yet another major reason. Were it not for the concept of the "brand" and the emphasis that so many companies put on their brand image in the U.S. there would be no need for many of designers' services. Logos, trademarks, advertising campaigns, and the like are all a result of brand managers trying to differentiate and sell their products to consumers. Industrial Design, and the formation of products that meet a need and solve consumers problems, would be unnecessary if there were no brands being managed and sold. As noted in the Design 200 course reading material, the Industrial Revolution was the cataclysmic moment that led to the historical switch from craftsmen to designers due to the much larger scale of production. I would argue that the brand management revolution in the 1930s, designed by McElroy, was just as influential a moment for Designers as a whole because of the increased emphasis it put on branding and all of the design elements that encompasses.

Since it is difficult to directly link images with the above outlined concept, the following are pictures of some of P&G's brand collateral that developed in the early years directly following the beginning of the brand management movement: