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

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 à 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

Automible advertising in Le Soir, Brussels 1905-1950

Without denying the importance of symbolic values inherent in modern advertising, I try to argue that arguments used in advertisements should be linked to commercial strategies as well as to broader cultural backgrounds. Advertising is never just advertising, it is always advertising for something. The presence —or absence— of appeal arguments has been a function of production techniques, commercial positions and the general situation on the market for the product involved. Arguments used in advertising do not just come into existence as an outcome of a natural process of evolution. Within an expanding market, the product-introducing force of appeal arguments can be useful. Yet producers will be likely to return to price/quality arguments whenever the market becomes stagnant, and competitive pressure rises

Recommendations for the representation of hierarchical objects in Europeana

The issue of handling hierarchical objects has been always an important topic for Europeana’s network of projects and Data Providers. The implementation of solutions in the Europeana portal has been delayed for a long time mainly due to the fact that complex objects required the development of new functionalities that could not be supported by the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) model. Indeed the simplicity and the flatness of this model prevented Data Providers from supplying complex objects

BTB 100: tien sleutelmomenten uit de geschiedenis van de Belgische Transportarbeidersbond

Honderd jaar vechten voor onze rechten, dat hebben we bij de Belgische Transportarbeidersbond gedaan sinds onze stichting in 1913. Enkele van de meest memorabele gevechten uit die periode hebben we gebundeld in dit boekje. Opdat we niet zouden vergeten waar we vandaan komen, waar we staan en waar we naartoe willen. Laten we daarbij het gezegde voor ogen houden van onze oud-voorzitter Louis Major, een visserszoon uit Oostende: ‘Niets is zo sterk als een mens die gelijk heeft.