Motivational Posters

I work in a school, which means I am usually surrounded by a variety of motivational posters. Every teacher seems to have their own style. Some only have one or two. Many have half a dozen or more. I’ve seen a few repeats but they are mostly unique to the teacher. Some have a generic saying like “respect is earned” and others feature quotes from famous people within the subject (ex: English teachers have quotes from writers). Whatever they are, they always seem to fit right in. In pretty much every classroom I’ve ever been in from pre-school to my senior year of high school, I’ve been exposed to these types of posters. Even in corporate offices, I’ve seen them. Those are usually a little less colorful and even more generic. Like this:

I’m wondering where this got started and if it even works. Who was the first person to put up a motivational poster in a classroom or an office? Why are they so ubiquitous? There are literally thousands of them available for purchase online. How did this whole thing get started?

To find the earliest example of motivational sloganeering, we have to go back to ancient Egypt, where inspirational quotes were painted on the sides of stone buildings. Modern motivational posters sprung up during the 19th and 20th centuries. They follow a format we’re all familiar with. Some kind of pretty picture with a quote or encouraging words emblazoned upon them. Here’s an example of one from 1927:

OK, so that one is a little misogynist and condescending. But you get the idea. It comes from a series known as “Action Posters” which was produced by the printing firm, CJ Howard, Inc. According to Katrina Martin, who wrote a fantastic post about these early posters, they were an invention of Charles Howard Rosenfeld:

In the early 1920s, salesman Charles Howard Rosenfeld proposed a series of motivational posters for workers to Charles Mather, who worked for his family’s Chicago printing house, the Mather Company. These “Constructive Organization Posters” were sold by subscription in over 300 varieties between 1923 and 1929.

The posters you are probably most familiar with are from a series of posters called “Successories". They first hit the market in 1985 and were sold by an entrepreneur named Mac Anderson. You can read more about him and his company here. Basically, he thought he could convince companies to fill in their blank wall space by combining beautiful pictures with inspiring quotes. With that, the modern motivational poster was born. The style is unmistakable.

While this kind of poster has fallen out of fashion, there are still millions of them around. You can almost always find them at a thrift store or Goodwill. A few of my friends growing up had them in their houses. You can still buy them from the Successories website. They also sell a variety of other products like awards, paperweights, and plushies.

How did they end up in schools? Probably the same way they ended up in offices across the country. There was empty wall space, people felt like they could imprint knowledge or ideas subliminally on students, and some crafty salesmen sold them to districts and teachers. I wasn’t able to find a lot of information about the history of motivational posters in schools. But I was able to find out if they were effective.

The answer: maybe?

Motivation is a hard thing to quantify. Successories claims a 33% improvement in worker performance can be observed after just two weeks of hanging their posters in the office. But does that last? Was it just a good couple of weeks? Let’s also not forget that they have a vested interest in demonstrating their product works. How many studies were done that showed no improvement or even a decline in performance? They seem to hang most of their argument on the idea that bland walls are boring and bored employees are less effective workers. Makes sense. But how long does it take until the posters just blend into the wall and you forget it’s even there?

In terms of how useful posters like these are in classrooms, I think we can agree that they likely have very little impact. An unruly student has never looked at a poster and changed their behavior. But there might be circumstances in which someone saw the right poster at the right time and it did have a lasting effect on them. I can say in my own life that despite 99.9% of posters mean nothing to me, there have been one or quotes that stuck with me over the years. One of them is a quote from Mark Twain:

The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.

Now, of course, Twain never said this. In fact, it likely came from a minister decades after Twain’s death. But the motivation it provides me works just the same. I’m sure students have seen similar quotes and found truth within them, whether or not they are accurately attributed. So, in the end, I think it’s worth having lots of posters in classrooms.

Social media is littered with posts like the one above. They are the 21st-century version of the motivational poster. Inspirational quotes (often misattributed to their originators) are the influencers most widely used tool. There isn’t enough data to say what kind of impact they have on people. Yes, they get a lot of likes but does that ever carry over into real life? Hard to say.

At the end of the day, posters and posts like these cause little harm. In fact, spoofs and parodies of them have brought a lot of laughter and joy into the world. And if they end up inspiring workers (if only for a week or two) then I think they have their place.

That’s motivation enough to keep them around.