I was born in the late 80s, grew up in the 90s and 2000s, and it’s both fascinating and terrifying to me how much of what I thought was just “standard” stuff was influenced by marketing 50-100 years before I was even born. Santa Clause as a jolly old man with rosy cheeks and a snow white beard wasn’t a big thing until Coca-Cola made it part of their advertising in the 30s. The bacon with breakfast thing was the result of a food packaging company in the 1920s hiring a man named Edward Bernays to help them sell more bacon. Bernays was allegedly so good at marketing/manipulation that people like Hitler and Goebbels kept copies of his books. Orange juice became a thing because orange producers in Florida in the early 1900s made too many oranges for the market (in an attempt to beat out California as the country’s orange production state), and juicing them was considered a better alternative to reducing production.
Listerine was a cleaning product until they decided to boost sales by positioning it as a mouthwash.
First, they had to convince everyone that they needed mouthwash, so they invented HALITOSIS (bad breath), and then offered Listerine as the solution.
Lysol tried a similar pivot, except they tried to market their cleaning product as post-sex birth control douche. Listerine’s pivot caught on, Lysol’s didn’t.
Halitosis was already the medical term for bad breath, with evidence of its use in England. All that word did was give an American businessman/marketer a polite euphemism to talk about something that was considered taboo at the time (body odors were associated with poor hygiene and lower status people). It does seem like they pushed hard with marketing to make it into a more widespread “problem” though.
I try not to think about it too much if it’s something that isn’t something that I need to interact with, like orange juice or bacon, both of which I avoid, because, yeah, it is terrifying. Advertisements are real life attempts to shape the behavior of the world.
I was born in the late 80s, grew up in the 90s and 2000s, and it’s both fascinating and terrifying to me how much of what I thought was just “standard” stuff was influenced by marketing 50-100 years before I was even born. Santa Clause as a jolly old man with rosy cheeks and a snow white beard wasn’t a big thing until Coca-Cola made it part of their advertising in the 30s. The bacon with breakfast thing was the result of a food packaging company in the 1920s hiring a man named Edward Bernays to help them sell more bacon. Bernays was allegedly so good at marketing/manipulation that people like Hitler and Goebbels kept copies of his books. Orange juice became a thing because orange producers in Florida in the early 1900s made too many oranges for the market (in an attempt to beat out California as the country’s orange production state), and juicing them was considered a better alternative to reducing production.
Listerine was a cleaning product until they decided to boost sales by positioning it as a mouthwash.
First, they had to convince everyone that they needed mouthwash, so they invented HALITOSIS (bad breath), and then offered Listerine as the solution.
Lysol tried a similar pivot, except they tried to market their cleaning product as post-sex birth control douche. Listerine’s pivot caught on, Lysol’s didn’t.
Halitosis was already the medical term for bad breath, with evidence of its use in England. All that word did was give an American businessman/marketer a polite euphemism to talk about something that was considered taboo at the time (body odors were associated with poor hygiene and lower status people). It does seem like they pushed hard with marketing to make it into a more widespread “problem” though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712170405/http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/thanks-to-chemistry/listerine.aspx
Someone to add to my time travel hit list
I try not to think about it too much if it’s something that isn’t something that I need to interact with, like orange juice or bacon, both of which I avoid, because, yeah, it is terrifying. Advertisements are real life attempts to shape the behavior of the world.