The commercial value of aspects of personality

Fame has an attractive force that lends itself well to commercial exploitation. Attributes of an individual's personality, such as a person's name, voice or likeness, are often used in advertising or merchandising in order to increase the attractiveness and saleability of goods and services. The practice is not new and dates from at least the nineteenth century. Since the advent of the industrial revolution and the increased proliferation of consumer products, advertisers and merchandisers sought new ways to draw the consuming public's attention and to differentiate their products and services from those of their rivals. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the names and images of well-known persons such as the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, German Count Zeppelin and the American inventor Thomas A. Edison were used to advertise, respectively, perfumes, cigars and medicinal products. Moreover, people with no obvious public profile began to find indicia of their identity used in advertising, resulting in varying degrees of distress, annoyance or indignation.

This reflects the fact that manufacturers of goods and suppliers of services can find the use of the images of a vast range of people beneficial to them in some way. Apart from the more common modern examples such as pop-stars and sportsmen, people of high professional standing, holders of public office, and politicians are often desirable people with whom to associate products or services.