“A little imp and a big caller”

Gottlieb Duttweiler was not only a cunning salesman, but also a tireless publicist. Week after week he spread the word about the Migros ethos: in ads that he dubbed newspaper in newspaper, in flyers and in Die Brücke.

Gottlieb Duttweiler is a particularly smart communicator. As his drivers take to the street for the first time in August 1925, he gives them a flyer to hand out explaining the programme of Migros AG. Eighteen months later, he buys advertising space for the first time in the Zurich Volksrecht, in order to make Migros news public. In it, he denounces the police department, which fined one of his drivers for “continually hooting, apparently for the sole purpose of attracting customers”. With this text advertisement, Duttweiler fights against the arbitrariness of the police department head, who is president of the shareholders’ meeting of the consumer association and therefore opposed to Migros. At the same time, Duttweiler establishes with this first publication a successful model of public relations, known in advertising jargon as argumentation advertising, and by Duttweiler as the “advertisement which wants to give the reader something”.

For the first time on 21 December 1927, Gottlieb Duttweiler buys advertising space in the three largest Zurich daily newspapers for Zeitung in der Zeitung. In addition to announcing Migros products, it also contains articles he has written on the development of Migros and on economic, political and ideological subjects that interest him. Not satisfied with “mere slogan advertisements”, he wants to “get into a discussion with the audience” and be “explanatory and advisory”. Later he lovingly calls the weekly Zeitung in der Zeitung a “little imp and big caller who all by himself lifts the lid on which ten thousand quietly sit, and who with rage and humour calls out the truth to the world”.
But the ‘imp’ does not always appear. Sometimes the reason is that its father, Duttweiler, is overloaded; mostly, however, it is the pressure Migros’ opponents put on the publishers. They refuse to publish the Zeitung in der Zeitung in order to avoid an advertising boycott by the brand article manufacturers and retailers. In reaction to this, Duttweiler hands out a flyer under the title Die Brücke, which is almost a first, small Migros newspaper. Zeitung in der Zeitung actually outlives its founder: in the 1970s, it appears in 33 daily newspapers in Switzerland and is discontinued only in 1996.