Edward Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the
popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women
to smoke.
At that time
(1920s), there was a taboo against women smoking and one of his early
clients George Hill, the President of the American Tobacco
corporation asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it.
As Bernays
descirbed, Hill told him that tobacco industry was losing half of the
market, because men have invoked a taboo against women smoking in
public. Then he asked him if he could do anything about it.
Bernays said
he would think about it and asked the permission to see a
psychoanalyst to find out
what cigarettes mean to women. So he called up Dr. Brille. A.A.
Brille was the leading psychoanalyst in New York at the time and one
of the first psychoanalysts in America. And for a large fee, he told
Bernays that cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual
power. He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect
cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power then women would
smoke, because then they would have their own penises.
Every year
New York held an Easter day parade to which thousands came. And
Bernays decided to stage an event there. He persuaded a group of rich
debutants to hide cigarettes under their clothes.
Then, they
should join the parade and at a given signal from him they were to
light up the cigarettes dramatically. Bernays then informed the press
that he had heard that a group of suffragettes were preparing to
protest by lighting up what they called torches of freedom.
He knew this
would be an outcry, and he knew that all of the photographers would
be there to capture this moment so he was ready with a phrase which
was “torches of freedom”.
So here you
have a symbol, women, young women, debutantes, smoking a cigarette in
public with a phrase that means anybody who believes in this kind of
equality pretty much has to support them in the ensuing debate about
this, because ... “torches of freedom”.
If one think
about it, what's on all American coins? it's liberty, she's holding
up the torch. And so all of this is there together, there's emotion,
there's memory and there's a rational phrase, even knowing it's using
a lot of emotionall, it's a phrase that works in a rational sense.
The next day
this was not just in all the New York papers it was across the United
States and around the world. And from that point forward the sale of
cigarettes to woman began to rise.
What Bernays
had created was the idea that if a woman smoked it made her more
powerful and independent. An idea that still persists today. It made
him realize that it was possible to persuade people to behave
irrationally if you link products to their emotional desires and
feelings. The idea that smoking actually made women freer, was
completely irrational. But it made them feel more independent. It
meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols
of how you wanted to be seen by others.
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