Sustainability for Kids: marketing

Earlier installments of this series on sustainability
are posted here: Part 1

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The modern methods for marketing products to consumers started about 100 years ago. They were designed by the “father” of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, the nephew of psychologist Sigmund Freud. Bernays used his uncle's theories to influence shopping behavior in the early 20th century.

But beyond his ideas on how to manipulate the masses, Freud believed that the masses should to be controlled and manipulated. He claimed to have found “primitive” aggressive forces in the human psyche that needed to be controlled. These forces were part of our animal past and Freud considered them dangerous. Freud saw the escalation of World War I in 1914 as proof of our subconscious aggressive nature.

The government seemed the perfect entity to control the dangerous masses and his nephew, Bernays, was in the perfect position: he was a member of the government's Committee on Public Information. This committee's job was to drum up public support for the US involvement in World War I. They did this by advertising propaganda, which is defined by dictionary.com as, “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”

Bernays was an ad man at heart, and used a slogan to promote the war effort: “Making the world safe for democracy.” This ad campaign worked so well that President Woodrow Wilson asked Bernays to join him at the Paris Peace Conference after the war ended. As the Paris crowds cheered for President Wilson, a direct result of his propaganda efforts, Bernays saw the great power of mass persuasion.

Uncle Freud had given Bernays his book, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, which helped him devise ways to use his own skill in advertising as a way to control people. He opened up shop in New York but decided not to call his work propaganda anymore because that had become a “bad word.” Instead, he coined a new term: public relations.

His idea was that if you frightened people by addressing their unconscious fears, and then soothed them with a product that could calm those fears, the masses would become distracted and docile through more and more consumption (shopping).

In 1929, the American Tobacco Corporation hired Bernays to change the public's opinion on smoking. At that time, there was a taboo against women smoking in public and Bernays created an ad campaign to promote the idea in a positive light. He consulted a psychoanalyst, Dr. Abraham Brill, practicing in New York to find out what cigarettes might mean to women. Brill told Bernays cigarettes represented male power, and suggested described them to women as a product that would challenge that male power.

To do this, Bernays hired female models to smoke in public at the Easter Day Parade in New York City. He tipped off the press that a group of suffragettes (a group promoting women's rights) were staging a protest at the parade by lighting up what they called “torches of freedom.” The phrase connected the idea of women smoking with the torch held by the Statue of Liberty and played on the emotions of Americans by tying cigarettes to their love of liberty. This staged and scripted event was a huge success.

Bernays had convinced the masses that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful. As a result, sales of cigarettes to women rose dramatically. This was evidence that Bernays could, indeed, influence the beliefs and behavior of the masses. Working for many corporations, Bernays went on to convince the public to buy all sorts of things they didn't need, and this trend has led to the consumerism we see all around us today.

The government would use these same tactics to influence public behavior, and we'll explore that next time.

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This article is one of a series I'm writing for the 30 Day Writing Challenge hosted by @dragosroua. If you want to join, write on a topic that interests you or that you'd like to learn more about and use the tag #challenge30days. As Dragos says, "The key word sequence here is: "write every day."

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[ public domain historical images /
cover art created with a pixabay.com image ]