P T Barnum And The Ringling Brothers

Phineas Taylor Barnum set the stage in the 1800s for using the outrageous and bizarre in attracting attention to his enterprises. He was responsible for developing methods of advertising and promotion that became known as ballyhoo, a term synonymous with attention getting. Businesses around the world, perhaps without realizing it, still employ his principles of entertainment, excitement, and enterprise. And they profit from it. Barnum created his own "stars" and then promoted them through advertising, flyers, and posters as he brought them to town. He was also a pioneer in the concept of public displays of his attractions, building his reputation and profits through museums and road shows. Among his feature attractions were General Tom Thumb (the world's smallest human), Jumbo (the world's largest elephant), and the golden-voiced Jenny Lind (the Swedish Nightingale), whom he introduced to American audiences with great fanfare in the 1850s.

It's interesting to note that his promotions left a permanent impression on the American lexicon. In addition to his Jumbo elephant attraction was a "genuine" white elephant named Toung Taloung. Barnum spent a fortune trying to convince audiences that Toung was not a fake, to little success. To this day, the term "jumbo" connotes bigness. And "white elephant" defines anything that is expensive to maintain, but yields little or no profitable results.

He and his partner, James A. Bailey, took his menagerie on the road, combining the wild animals with other circus acts. They were convinced that success lay in taking the enterprise to the people rather than waiting for audiences to find their "Greatest Show on Earth." The partners took this approach to a fine art of promotion and marketing after merging with the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1919. They built circus wagons for the tour, gaily painted with promises of amazing feats and attractions. In time, they began loading their wagons onto railway cars and then began purchasing freight cars themselves, again painting them in bold colors so no one could mistake the fact that the circus was coming.

Barnum and Bailey were already practicing target marketing, although the term had not been invented at that time. They knew that the communities their show visited needed to know that entertainment was on the way, that excitement was right around the bend!

Thus began the marketing techniques that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey practices today: publishing a road schedule, sending advance press releases to pertinent media sources, and announcing the exact train schedule so that people could gather with their "children of all ages" at train stations along the route to watch the circus cars roar by. Their target markets were not just the destination cities but also the public at large.

They included every town en route. Today, you can find Web sites with photos posted by people who take pictures of the train as it passes through their communities; such is the power of imaginative target marketing. People who could not attend the circus performing miles away could at least be a part of it as it graced their town by just passing through. This was a brilliant marketing strategy, designed to attract national attention despite the fact that it was essentially a product that was offered locally. And then, to gain even more publicity, their producers staged a parade from the train station to the circus site, bringing throngs to see the animals, costumed performers, and clowns up close—even before the first tent had been erected. To this day, this combination of street "stunts" and parades attracts the attention of millions, most of whom cannot attend the event itself.

In many ways, the theories that the Ringling Brothers and P. T. Barnum began developing in the 1800s are even more effective today. Never could they have dreamed of the new technologies that we take for granted, making even more productive the marketing concepts they practiced then—entertainment, excitement, and enterprise, and an understanding of target markets. This marketing strategy quilts a fabric of awareness not just on show site but throughout the countryside, and creates a warm and fuzzy consciousness of earlier, more carefree times.

And that is what P. T. Barnum and the Ringling Brothers had in mind in the first place.

Continue reading here: George Preston Marshall

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