Sometimes it just gets a little too overwhelming with all those emotions: Beauty, victory, tragedy, history, morality and ethics. Where did the pure, sharp and factual intelligence go? To Porsche, of course, and here are a number of advertisements clearly demonstrating it.
Of course, emotions have always heavily utilised in advertising. Apparantly it works something like this: The more indifferent the advertised product is, the more important it is for the arguments to stem from emotions. But cars are not indifferent products – they are high tech mechanisms and very expensive purchases, which should be able to mobilize more than a provisional impression from cheap marketing tricks without substance? Sure – but nevertheless, emotions are everpresent in car advertisements as well.
Who better to counter that than Porsche? Indeed; and in the seventies and eighties Porsche did in fact run a fantastic series of advertisements known as the “Porsche Consumer Orientation”-series. The responsible creative brain behind this series was Helmut Krone, who tested his theories about the page and its layout as its own brand. “Words as form”, some called it: You did not really need to read the words in order to grasp the overall meaning.
It makes sense when you see some of the advertisements, doesn’t it?
They ran from the mid seventies to the mid eighties, and there were about 28 of them – of course, numbered as an everpresent part of their wealth of facts. The ads treated every subject from weight distribution over aerodynamics to turbocharger technology in an in-depth and thorough manner which seems quite overwhelming today.
But the most amazing thing is that they work exactly as Krone predicted: Even without reading the words, these advertisements will leave you in no doubt whatsoever that every Porsche possesses advanced and high-tech ingenuity, abilities and quality. Thus, the fact-packed pages without a hint of emotion awakes just that anyway: They make me desire. A Porsche.
