Marknadsföra Sverige för alla svenskar: en studie av modernitetens avspegling i reklamannonser under det tidiga 1900-talets Sverige

Sammanfattning: The impact and effect of marketing is an ongoing debate and has been since the beginning of the 20th century. This has led to different ideas and hypotheses about universal divergence. The starting point for this essay lies between two prominent perspectives of marketing (the critical view of advertising and the view of advertising as an "economic lubricant"). Between these two perspectives, Roland Marchand develops a new approach in which he takes a closer look at the expression of modernity in advertising in the US between 1920-40. Based on this analysis, he builds a theory around a "zerrspiegel", i.e. a distortion mirror which shows a distorted image in the advertising of contemporary society, which is built up from the marketing industry's idealized image of its contemporaries. Our comparative study will take a closer look at modernity from a Swedish context and compare this with Marchand's theories that deals with the American context. The research questions: How has modernity been expressed in a Swedish context? How has modernity been expressed in Swedish advertising? How does Swedish modernity and it's expression in advertising differ from the American context? What are reasons behind these differences? The study shows that the Swedish and the American context are relatively similar until 1930s. After this we begin to see a division where the Swedish advertising reflects a more collectivistic view with "folkhemmet" while the American rather goes towards a more liberating thought that reflects the "American dream ". In the Swedish context, there seems to be a certain distortion in the reflection of society in advertising, which indicates that Marchand's "zerrspiegel" theory also holds in a Swedish context. This study is based on a relatively narrow delimitation of industries where advertising has been analyzed. Therefore, future essays that take a closer look at a broader field of industries could complement ours and increase the understanding of how modernity was expressed in Swedish advertising.