"Why does the Baby Peugeot? That’s silly, isn’t it? But it does.”
“SUCCESS, SUCCEEDS, SUCCESS: try and say that quickly six times and then say BABY PEUGEOT.”
“You don’t mind me being here, do you?” “BABY PEUGEOT has no infantile complaints.” “The car that will take any pill.” “Baby Peugeots won’t wash clothes, but every agent sells them.” “I have recently taken to motoring. I find it most fascinating.” “Why? Why Not?” “Who called me BABY PUGDOG?”
If you’re feeling bewildered by these impenetrably abstract slogans, consider how they looked amid the turgid and stiff-collared usual fare of early-1900s Autocar advertising in which they existed.
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Just what was going on? “PEOPLE SAY: FRISWELL’S advertisements ARE ABSURD. So do we; but if they were not you would not read them.”
Well, that explains that. How fabulously anachronistic, though – like some zoomer-baiting online marketing campaign 120 years early.
Even more so when you see the accompanying back-page imagery of Charles Friswell himself pulling silly poses or holding said voiturette in his palm, and indeed contrasted by such dry marketing copy as: “In response to continual demands for British-made tyres for heavy motor cars, of the excellence of Dunlop Tyres, arrangements are now being completed for the home manufacture of motor tyres for heavy vehicles.”
Friswell even ran an amusing illustration of the Baby Peugeot looping the loop on a rollercoaster track along with the slogan: “Photography cannot lie.”
He boasted of being Britain’s “only successful motor carriage auctioneer” in these earliest years of motoring (“he sells 90% more than any other firm advertising the same business”). It’s telling that his father was an advertising agent.
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