A strategy of seduction? The role of commercial advertisements in the eighteenth-century retailing business of Antwerp

Dries Lyna and Ilja Van Damme

Business History, 2009, vol. 51, issue 1, 100-121

Abstract: This article aims to place the use of promotional advertising material in a long-term perspective. By analysing the functioning of eighteenth-century commercial notices in the retailing business of Antwerp, a provincial town in the southern Netherlands, we try to demonstrate how advertisements of this kind had no clear-cut persuasive meaning. Rather, they were used as a way of mediating information barriers between buyers and sellers and, thus, lowering transaction costs. A quantitative and semantic breakdown of the advertisements in a local newspaper, the Gazette van Antwerpen, will show the fallacies of presuming a direct manipulative force from these eighteenth-century commercial messages.

Keywords: eighteenth century; southern Netherlands; Antwerp; newspaper advertisements; retailing business; commercial discourse; consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1080/00076790802604475

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