Steve Campbell-Wright
Steve Campbell-Wright Imperial Echoes: one company’s exploitation of cultural identity in marketing cars before the Great War To buy a car before the Great War of 1914–18 showed that the owner was a person of means, be it old money, new money or borrowed money. The running costs alone of an average car could keep a small, working-class family in a degree of comfort. In 1910, a seven horsepower, single-cylinder Austin, complete with body, cost £1501; while at the other end of the scale, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost began at £985 for the chassis alone2—the equivalent in 2016 Australian terms of over $200,000. Within the ranks of the relatively wealthy, the investment placed in a car indicated much about the owner. According to Bill Boddy, a former editor of British magazine Motor Sport, ‘the wealthy bought Rolls-Royces, the aristocracy bought Daimlers.’3 One Australian firm, Dalgety and Company, held the exclusive rights to sales of Daimler cars before the war, and the company’s approach to marketing indicates much about Australian society and its reflection of the class structure at ‘home’ in Britain. Social identity was a rich marketing vein to be tapped when the conditions were right. This paper examines the marketing style and approach of Dalgety and Company in the years before the Great War, with particular reference to its sales of Daimler cars. It asks whether such marketing—as a construct within social behaviour—indicated and reinforced the social stratification of Edwardian Britain in Australia. 1| AHA 2016 Conference Proceedings Steve Campbell-Wright Imperial Echoes: one company’s exploitation of cultural identity in marketing cars before the Great War The Daimler Motor Company Limited was the first British car manufacturer, having been incorporated in 1896.4 The company’s first cars were German-made Daimler cars imported from Cannstatt, Germany; and their first Coventry-made vehicles were manufactured under licence using Gottlieb Daimler’s designs and patents.
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