Persuasion
‘Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.’
– ROGER THORNHILL (Cary Grant) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest
In the mid-nineteenth century, European scientists led by Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany developed and proved the germ theory of medicine, which swept away centuries of myth and superstition. From new theories new practices. Joseph Lister in Britain was quick to see that if germs caused infection, then surgery was almost an open invitation to gangrene. Since wounds couldn’t be heated or filtered – two of the standard ways of eliminating germs in the laboratory – that left only chemical compounds. Lister knew that sewage was successfully deodorised with carbolic acid and began to spray a solution of it on open wounds and surgical instruments – and forced surgeons to wash their hands in a mild carbolic solution before operating. The incidence of gangrene among his patients declined precipitously. By 1870, his innovations had been enthusiastically adopted and improved upon, first in Germany, then further afield. Countless lives were saved. A medical revolution was born.
Needless to say, revolutions breed innovation. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a scramble was on to develop ever more effective chemical compounds to play the role of sterilizing agents. One such formulation was developed by a couple of American researchers for use in surgical situations. A couple of decades later, the same product, but heavily diluted, was sold to dentists for use in oral care. Two decades later still, the same product was sold as a mouthwash to America’s burgeoning middle class. In honour of the great Joseph Lister, the mouthwash was christened Listerine. It was a nice touch, but almost nobody bought the mouthwash.
Then the young Gerard B. Lambert took over management of the family firm. He had a revolutionary idea of his own. He’d advertise the product, something that the company had never done in its history. For a year, nothing happened. The copy was awkward, old-fashioned, uncertain. It didn’t work. The firm’s profit (which included income from items other than the mouthwash) remained stuck at its historic levels of about $100,000 a year. But then Lambert and his two ad-men, Milton Feasley and Gordon Seagrove, hit gold. Their new ad depicted a gorgeous young woman, alongside copy which told the affecting tale of a handsome young businessman finding himself rejected after a single romantic date. The ad’s headline commented darkly, ‘He Never Knew Why’.
The answer, said Messrs Lambert, Feasley and Seagrove, was halitosis, a term so obscure that very few doctors would have recognized it and most dictionaries of the age ignored it. All the same, the term had a pleasingly classical ring to it and it sounded scientific. As Roland Marchand comments in his Advertising the American Dream, ‘the ads took the form of quick-tempo sociodramas in which readers were invited to identify with temporary victims in tragedies of social shame. Now the protagonist was not the product but the potential consumer, suffering vicariously a loss of love, happiness, and success.’ Consumers responded to the ad in their droves. By 1927, the profits of Lambert Pharmaceutical had increased from $100,000 to more than $4 million. The advertising budget for Listerine saw a fiftyfold increase over a similar time-period.
Naturally enough, if you do something once and it succeeds magnificently, you’re under an almost overwhelming temptation to do the same all over again. It was a temptation that Lambert made no effort to resist. No sooner had his halitosis campaign started to take off, than he started to wonder what other ailments might not also be curable by this miracle mouthwash. The answer was quite a few. Listerine, it seemed, was an excellent after-shave tonic. It could cure colds. It would take care of sore throats. It was an excellent astringent, and who could possibly resist its effectiveness as a deodorant?
Listerine might very well have turned out to be the cure for all sorts of other things besides – ingrowing hairs, rough skin, violent conflict, old age – except that success breeds competition, and all kinds of other brands sought to muscle in on Listerine’s turf. Laundry starches became beauty baths (for ‘Fastidious Women’, naturally). New diseases were invented by the score. Do you, for example, suffer from ‘acidosis’ (sour stomach)? No? Then perhaps you worry about ‘bromodosis’ or ‘homotosis’? (Sweaty foot odours and a lack of attractive home furnishings, respectively.) If you have survived those afflictions, then do you perhaps need to consult a doctor about accelerator toe, ashtray breath or office hips? The world of the 1920s American consumer was strewn with new perils, new cures.
In all of this, it was almost easy to lose sight of one, rather central question. Did Listerine actually do anything for bad breath? The answer, then and now, is that its contribution is decidedly modest. Any liquid, whether a glassful of tapwater or a mouthwash named in honour of the father of antiseptic surgery, will coat the mouth, wash away surplus food particles, and mildly reduce the build-up of dental plaque. Listerine may be somewhat better than pure water in doing just that, but it is certainly a lesser part of good dental hygiene than either brushing or flossing. Indeed, the alcohol content of many mouthwashes may dry the back of the tongue and thereby encourage the growth of the bacteria which are largely responsible for bad breath. If you really want to deal with bad breath then brush your teeth, floss, and, if you really must, gently scrape the back of your tongue with the edge of a teaspoon. Despite fifty years of advertising to the contrary, Listerine does nothing at all to help with colds or sore throats. No data has ever been produced to demonstrate that Listerine has helped the guy get the girl or the girl get her guy.
Lambert’s story is the perfect way to introduce the topic of salesmanship. It’s a tale which begins with Pasteur, Koch and Lister – a group of scientists responsible for one of the most important set of medical discoveries ever. Their work was rigorous and scientific. It has been of vast and continuing benefit to mankind. By contrast, the story of Listerine mouthwash begins with an invention: a pseudo-medical term, a phoney disease, and unjustifiable medical claims. The product created to honour Lister was founded on a fraud.
Listerine may not have done much to endear itself to medical science, but in the annals of consumer marketing, Gerry Lambert can claim an honoured place. Consumer brands had only been around for some thirty or forty years, when Listerine took off. The first British company to register a trademark was Bass, the brewing company, whose red triangle logo was registered in 1876 and is still in use today. Yet a trademark and a brand are rather different. A trademark as boring as Bass’s triangle does nothing to encode a more complex identity in the consumer’s mind. If Bass’s was the first British trademark, then Lyle’s Golden Syrup with its green and gold can and its wonderfully weird illustration* has some claim to be the world’s first and longest enduring consumer brand.
America proved to be even more fertile ground for consumer marketing. The challenge for the first marketers of mass-produced consumer goods was to convince buyers that their products were as good as those offered by better known local suppliers. In densely settled Europe, with its long-established communities, those local bonds were often slower to break down. In America, with its vast landmass, unsettled population, and new communities, there was often little or no local bond to conquer. In 1882, Quaker Oats launched a national ad campaign around its logo of a ‘man in Quaker garb’. Coca-Cola’s famous cursive logo arrived in 1885, though the bottle wouldn’t follow for a further thirty years. The year 1900 saw the arrival of Campbell soup served up in a tin looking much the same as it does today.
Important as these innovations were, they remained tentative. In 1900, J. Walter Thompson started to pitch the idea of trademark advertising – that is, the notion of building a family of associations around a familiar logo or product – but it would take the heated, urbanized atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties for Thompson’s vision to be fully realized. Gerry Lambert and his reckless talent for invention was one of marketing’s first and greatest stars. Lambert was no longer selling a mouthwash; he was selling an aspiration, a lifestyle, a fantasy, a dream.
That’s the positive spin. The negative one is that he was also creating a fear that had never existed before – the fear of ‘halitosis’ – and answering it with a collection of half-truths and lies. As consumers ourselves, we suspect all salespeople of the same willingness to say anything at