Advertising: Icons and Spokespeople

As appealing as advice from “experts” might be, food manufacturers have often sought to imbue their brand-name products with personality by using, or more often inventing, icons or spokespeople to hawk their wares. One of the earliest and most enduring of these was Baker’s Chocolate’s La Belle Chocolatiere, trademarked in 1836 and based on an eighteenth-century painting of a chocolate shop waitress carrying a tray of cups. In subsequent years she would be seen carrying a plate of brownies, a giant chocolate bar, and other, similar confections. Many icons have been chosen more arbitrarily: the smiling African American chef that has graced Cream of Wheat packages since 1893 is there primarily because the original printer found a woodblock in his storeroom with that image.