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January 12, 2009 In By Advent

Howard Luck Gossage: Pioneer of Experiential Marketing

Some­where around the age of 36, Howard Gos­sage fell into the field of adver­tis­ing. His first job was at San Francisco′s Brisacher, Wheeler and Staff. Of his hir­ing, he noted, “I got into adver­tis­ing, actu­ally, because there wasn′t any­thing else I knew how to do.” While there, he would rise to the posi­tion of Vice Pres­i­dent before the firm was bought out by Cun­ning­ham and Walsh, a com­pet­ing agency. In 1957, he joined forces with Joe Wiener and at that point began his self employment.

From his hall­mark adver­tis­ing offices in San Francisco’s Orig­i­nal Fire­house #1, he cre­ated a num­ber of clas­sic ads through which he sin­gle hand­edly devel­oped the field of Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing. In his first adver­tise­ments for Eagle Shirt­mak­ers, he asked cus­tomers to send in to the com­pany for their com­ple­men­tary Eagle Label, thus insur­ing that their store label shirt would be for­ever iden­ti­fied with it’s maker (Eagle, at the time, was a white label pro­ducer of store brand shirts). Thou­sands of read­ers sent in for the free label and the adver­tise­ment was an imme­di­ate suc­cess, mak­ing the steady brand a house­hold name.

In his later work, Gos­sage would implore read­ers to write in for ‘Pink Air’ from Fina Gaso­line sta­tions (on the idea that since every­thing else at a Fina sta­tion had already been per­fected with addi­tives, mak­ing the air that goes in tires pink was the only addi­tional improve­ment they could think of) and to send their paper air­plane designs to the Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can headquarters.

Every time Howard Gos­sage ran an ad with a tiny coupon in the lower right cor­ner, thou­sands of peo­ple would cut it out, put it in an enve­lope with a stamp and mail it in. This idea of involv­ing the con­sumer in the mes­sage was one of Gossage’s pri­mary con­tri­bu­tions to our craft, and has been car­ried on to the present day in the form of expe­ri­en­tial marketing.

Authored By Advent

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