The commercial development of the Song dynasty led to an obvious self-consciousness in advertising. The Song dynasty’s Zhuang Chao’s “Chicken Ribs Compilation” said, “Anyone selling cooked food in the capital must have a bizarre language and then sell a wide range of products. Ouyang Xiu’s Record of Return to the Field also states that “all the food stores in the capital are listed in the thoroughfares with big signs. This is the conscious awareness of advertising. In busy cities, commercial advertisements can be seen everywhere. Unfolding the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, we find that the painter captured dozens of advertisements, of which there are 10 advertising fronts, 23 advertising signs, at least four light box advertisements, and five large advertising decorations – colorful buildings and doors.
“The hotel industry in the Song dynasty paid particular attention to advertising, “small city wine flag can call guests. The “Rongzhai Continuation of the Pen” contained, “now the capital and county liquor business, and all of the liquor shops in northern China, are unveiled outside the big curtain, with a few pieces of green and white cloth.” This “blue and white cloth” is the “wine flag”. The Tokyo Monghualu also contains, “All the hotels of the capital, the head of the door are tied to colored buildings and happy door”, and the hotels in the Nine Bridges Market, even more “colored buildings against each other, embroidered pennants to move, covering the cataracts of the sky. Here, the “pennant” refers to the city’s move; “color buildings and doors” is built of bamboo and wood and color palm to build a gatehouse, is popular in the Song Dynasty hotel industry advertising decoration, the more senior the hotel, color buildings and doors are more luxurious. The “Sun Yang Zhengdian” depicted in the painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” is two or three stories high and very imposing. In the painting, a “foot store” near the Rainbow Bridge (a foot store was a small hotel in the Song dynasty) also has a very conspicuous colorful building and door. If we had the chance to travel back in time to the Song Dynasty, we could tell it was a hotel by looking at the colorful buildings and doors.
A relatively new marketing tactic is the light box advertisement. In front of the gate of Sun Yang Zhengdian in the Riverside Scene, there are three three-dimensional signs that read “Sun Yang,” “Zhengdian,” “Fragrant Moromi,” and “Sun Yang” respectively. “The three three-dimensional signs are lightbox advertisements. This billboard is particularly eye-catching because of its lighting technology – built-in candles that shine brightly at night. The “foot store” near the Rainbow Bridge also has a lightbox advertisement in front of its door, with the words “Ten Thousand” and “Foot Shop” written on it. “Ten Thousand” is a synonym for fine wine, as in a Tang poem: “Xinfeng beautiful wine dou ten thousand, Xianyang ranger how many years”. Lightbox advertising is a common thing in the modern business world, but many people may not know that lightbox advertising has appeared in the Song Dynasty. Today, in some places in Japan and Korea, this ancient advertisement is still preserved in its antiquity and unique flavor.
As the saying goes, “Good wine is not afraid of deep alleys.” But the Song people’s idea is that good wine also needs to be advertised, and in order to attract attention, advertising has to be creative. The “Old Story of Wulin” and “Meng Liang Lu” are recorded that, whenever the new wine is baked, the liquor store (i.e., government-run hotels) will make a lot of fanfare: a long pole to hang out the advertising banner, the book “a library of selected big famous master brewers, brewing a color of superior concentrated spicy incomparable high wine, was the first in the first” and other advertising words, which are called This is called “cloth sign”; secondly, “using a wooden bed and iron frame as a kind of fairy, Buddha, ghosts and gods, flying in the air”, that is, children or actors are fixed on a wooden platform, dressed as fairy, Buddha, ghosts and gods, and perform on the hotel facade, which is called “Taiwan Pavilion”. “This is similar to the way companies today invite show business stars to endorse their products.
It seems that the forms of advertising such as pretense and signboards were nothing new in the Song Dynasty, and star endorsement also appeared. It is also worth mentioning here the printed advertisements of the Song Dynasty. Printed advertisements were characterized by the fact that they could be reproduced in large quantities and widely distributed or posted. Pharmacies in the Song dynasty had already begun to use a type of printed advertisement called “copy sheets” (advertising leaflets embedded in products). Among the unearthed Song artifacts, there is a copper plate engraved with an “imitation sheet” from the Xianchun period of the Southern Song Dynasty, which was the printing plate used by the Wanliu Tang Pharmacy in Sichuan Province to print advertising flyers, and the printed advertisements were quite exquisite: about six or seven inches square, surrounded by patterns, with “Wanliu Tang Pharmacy” engraved between the patterns. “One of the pictures shows two people, one of them is asthmatic, the other is vigorous, with the words “asthma” and “healing power” written in the picture, which can be seen as a representation of the patient before and after taking the medicine. The state of the print was used to illustrate the therapeutic effects of the drug (according to Wang Bo Min, “A General History of Chinese Printmaking,” 33 pages, Hebei Art Publishing House).
The Museum of Chinese History also has a copperplate of an advertisement from the Northern Song dynasty, with the following print: at the top is a large line of characters: “Jinan Liu Family Kung Fu Needle Shop”; in the middle is a picture of a “white rabbit pounding medicine”; and on both sides of the picture are the following markings “Two lines of instructions were written on the doorstep of the white rabbit, and below that was an advertisement that read: “Buy the best steel bars, make fine needles, don’t steal work, use them for the people’s convenience, if you are sold, don’t be forgiven, please remember the white ones. It was four or five hundred years before the first English-language printed advertisement appeared in Europe. This Song advertising leaflet is not only the world’s first printed advertisement, but also one of the most noteworthy details: it advertises not just a product (Kung Fu needles), but a brand (the Liu Family Kung Fu Needle Shop), and the “White Rabbit” is the world’s oldest trademark that can be verified.
The commercial and industrialists of the Song dynasty already had a clear awareness of the trademark, open the “Tokyo Meng Hua Lu”, “Meng Liang Lu” or “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”, the author (painter) recorded a wide variety of signs can be described as a wide variety, such as “Qian family dried fruit store”, “G family honey jujube”, “G family”. “Yu Family Crown Shop”, “Ling Family Brush Shop”, “Xu Mao Jia Fan Shop”, “Zhang Gu Gu Rouge Shop”. The following are some of the most famous shops in the world: Zaoji Wang’s Gold and Silver Shop, Liu’s Coloring and Sunken Sandalwood and Incense Picking Shop, Double Gourd Eye Pharmacy, Guo Medical Product Pharmacy. “The following pharmacies are also available: “The Zhao Taishen Family”, “Ren’ai Tang Prepared Medicine Shop”, “Xiu’yi Fang San Bu Deception Medicine Shop”, “Sun Yang Main Store”, “Yellow Pointed Mouth Cueball Tea House”, “Ichigutou Ghost Tea House”, and the list goes on and on. These signs are trademark in nature. In Southern Song Dynasty, there was a “surgeon Xu Lutai, who was able to treat carbuncles and boils for many lifetimes, and his door was marked with a tower, hence the name” (Yi Jian Ding Zhi). There was also a doctor in the Dehua Bridge in Raozhou, who “was in the business of selling wind medicine” and made his own logo of “(one person) holding a forked hook in his hand and leading a black lacquered wooden pig”, which was hung in the doorway of the medical hall and was called “Gao Tu”. This “Gao Tu” became a well-known trademark in Raozhou City. This “Gao Tu” has become a well-known trademark of Raozhou City.
From the bronze mirrors, porcelain and metal wares of the Song Dynasty unearthed today, one can see various “mindfulness”, which is also a trademark. The origin of the trademark can be traced back to the ancient tradition of “Wu Le Gong Name”: “Wu Le Gong Name, in order to test its sincerity, if there is improper work, it will be a crime. The earliest “Wuhle Work Name” was only a mandatory liability determination, not yet a trademark. But in the long process of evolution, with the development of the market economy, it made some of the best firms stand out and became a widely trusted brand. When the brand was formed, the industrial and commercial practitioners who owned the brand tended to actively leave their own unique marks on their products instead of the passive “object name” in order to distinguish them from other similar products, and the trademark was born. Some of the bronze mirrors produced in Huzhou during the Song Dynasty were engraved with the mirror maker’s store number, such as “Huzhou Town Shijia Nianji zhaozi (zhaozi, or mirror)” and “Huzhou Real Shijia Nianji zhaozi”. The reason for adding the word “real” in front of “Shijia Nian Erxu” is to emphasize that they are not counterfeits. This also means that “Shijia Nian Er Shu” had become the brand of mirror making in Huzhou at that time, which led to the emergence of some counterfeit products.
The reason why Song merchants and industrialists promoted their brands (rather than their products) was, of course, because Song consumers were already aware of the need for brand-name goods. There is a detail in the Song playbook “The White Queen of Yongzhen Leifeng Pagoda”: Xu Xian went out and encountered rain, so he borrowed an umbrella from his relative Li Jiang-shi, who owned a pharmacy. Li told the old man of the pharmacy to give Xu Xian an umbrella. Old Chen handed the umbrella to Xu Xian and repeatedly told him, “Little B, this umbrella is made by the Eighty-four Bones, Purple Bamboo Handle family of the Eighty-four Bands Bridge in Qinghu, and it has never been broken. Carefully! Carefully!” Xu Xian said, “You don’t have to pay for it.” Later, Xu Xian lent the umbrella to the White Snake, and a marriage was arranged. But what we want to note here is not Xu Xian’s love, but rather the consumer consciousness of the Song citizens represented by Lao Chen: apparently, “Honest Shu Jia” was a big brand of umbrella making, and was very popular among consumers. Although the plot of the Song script is fictional, but it is a reflection of social life in the Song Dynasty, because at that time the public did have the consumer psychology of the pursuit of the brand, “Meng Liang Lu” said, “most likely to buy things, more tend to famous and well-known.” The so-called “famous and well-known”, in today’s words, is not the “famous brand”, “well-known trademark”?
(From Wu Hook, Rediscovering the Song Dynasty, Kyushu Press, 2014-4)
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