9 Advertising corporations ‘With public opinion on its side, nothing can fail’ - Abraham Lincoln nce upon a time, the head of a big corporation went into Cartier’s O and ordered a diamond bracelet for his wife. ‘Send the bill to my office,’ said he. Nothing doing – Cartier had never heard of his corporation. The next morning he instructed his agency to prepare a corporate advertising campaign. Eighty-one out of the hundred biggest American corporations advertise their corporations as distinct from their products, and spend about $500,000,000 a year in the process. Most of them make a hash of it. However, if well planned and executed, corporate advertising can be a profitable investment. Opinion Research Corporation has found that people who know a company well are five times more likely to have a favorable opinion of it. Corporate advertising can improve the morale of your employees; who wants to work for an outfit that nobody has ever heard of? It can also make it easier to recruit better people, at all levels. And, I believe, it can make your corporation a more seductive suitor in takeover bids. Discretion stops me naming a rich corporation which has recently failed in several takeover bids because its image is unattractive. Can corporate advertising make a good impression on the investment community? Yes it can, and this is the unspoken purpose of most such campaigns. A study conducted at Northwestern University examined the stock performance of 731 corporations, and found that corporate advertising had an average positive influence of 2 per cent on the price of their stock. If you think this trivial, reflect that if a corporation has a market value of forty billion dollars – and some do – that extra 2 per