Selling dreams: advertising strategies from grands magasins to supermarkets in Ghent, 1900-1960

Abstract

As argued above, the specific historical role of the grands magasins follows directly out of their capacity to fuse modernist bourgeois culture and commercial mass production into a dream marriage. The commercialization of modernism took place in the heyday of the department store, the last decades of the nineteenth century. From the 1920s on, a major change was taking place. As consumption was on the rise, paralleling the welfare society coming into being, the department stores, with a high concentration of capital in their hands, were not to remain indifferent. Following the prix uniques principle, expansion was to take place on three levels. Geographically webs of ever more local branches were created; commercially the emphasis upon fashionable goods faded away as basic products like food stuff were taken in; and finally socially the department stores were to come out of their bourgeois background, addressing themselves to a much broader stratum of the population. By 1960 the transformation of the former grands magasins had become irreversible, destroying most of the historical identity of the stores, and leading them into a confrontation with the maisons a succursales. Still, as contrasted with the end of the nineteenth century, during this second phase of the development of a consumer society from the 1920s on, the grands magasins were no longer fore-runners, merely good followers as stores in general were making way for brand-names on the publicity market. Still, paying a last tribute to their social and cultural roots, the grands magasins found a compromise in an advertising style of their own, convincing through low prices and seducing through genteel images.