by Bill Bryson
But the great breakthrough in twentieth-century advertising came with the identification and exploitation of the American consumer’s Achilles heel: anxiety. One of the first to master the form was King Gillette, inventor of the first safety razor and one of the most relentless advertisers of the early 1900s. Most of the early ads featured Gillette himself, who with his fussy toothbrush moustache and well-oiled hair looked more like a caricature of a Parisian waiter than a captain of industry. After starting with a few jaunty words about the ease and convenience of the safety razor ‘Compact? Rather!’ – he plunged the reader into the heart of the matter: ‘When you use my razor you are exempt from the dangers that men often encounter who allow their faces to come in contact with brush, soap and barber shop accessories used on other people.’
Here was an entirely new approach to selling goods. Gillette’s ads were in effect telling you that not only did there exist a product that you never previously suspected you needed, but if you didn’t use it you would very possibly attract a crop of facial diseases you never knew existed. The combination proved irresistible. Though the Gillette razor retailed for a hefty $5 – half the average working man’s weekly pay – they sold in their millions and King Gillette became a very wealthy man. (Though only for a time, alas. Like many others of his era, he grew obsessed with the idea of the perfectibility of mankind and expended so much of his energies writing books of convoluted philosophy with titles like The Human Drift that eventually he lost control of his company and most of his fortune.)8
By the 1920s advertisers had so refined the art that a consumer could scarcely pick up a magazine without being bombarded with unsettling questions: ‘Do You Make These Mistakes in English?’, ‘Will Your Hair Stand Close Inspection?’, ‘When Your Guests Are Gone Are You Sorry You Ever Invited Them?’ (because, that is, you lack social polish), ‘Did Nature Fail to put Roses in Your Cheeks?’, ‘Will There be a Victrola in Your Home This Christmas?’*27 The 1920s truly were the Age of Anxiety. One ad pictured a former golf champion, ‘now only a wistful onlooker’, whose career had gone sour because he had neglected his teeth. Scott Tissues mounted a campaign showing a forlorn-looking businessman sitting on a park bench beneath the bold caption ‘A Serious Business Handicap – These Troubles That Come From Harsh Toilet Tissue’. Below the picture the text explained: ‘65% of all men and women over 40 are suffering from some form of rectal trouble, estimates a prominent specialist connected with one of New York’s largest hospitals. “And one of the contributing causes,” he states, “is inferior toilet tissue.”’ There was almost nothing that one couldn’t become uneasy about. One ad even asked: ‘Can You Buy a Radio Safely?’ Distressed bowels were the most frequent target. The makers of Sal Hepatica warned: ‘We rush to meetings, we dash to parties. We are on the go all day long. We exercise too little, and we eat too much. And, in consequence, we impair our bodily functions often we retain food within us too long. And when that occurs, poisons are set up – Auto-Intoxication begins.’9
In addition to the dread of auto-intoxication, the American consumer faced a positive assault course of other newly minted or rediscovered maladies – pyorrhea, halitosis (popularized by Listerine beginning in 1921), athlete’s foot (a term invented by the makers of Absorbine Jr. in 1928), dead cuticles, scabby toes, iron-poor blood, vitamin deficiency (vitamins had been coined in 1912, but the word didn’t enter the general American vocabulary until the 1920s when advertisers realized it sounded worryingly scientific), fallen stomach, tobacco breath, dandruff, and psoriasis, though Americans would have to wait until the next decade for the scientific identification of the gravest of personal disorders – body odour, a term invented in 1933 by the makers of Lifebuoy soap and so terrifying in its social consequences that it was soon abbreviated to a whispered BO.
The white-coated technicians of American laboratories had not only identified these new conditions, but – miraculously, it seemed – had simultaneously come up with cures for them. Among the products that were invented or rose to greatness in this busy, neurotic decade were Cutex (for those deceased cuticles), Vick’s Vapo Rub, Geritol, Serutan (‘Natures spelled backwards’, as the voice-over always said with somewhat bewildering reassurance, as if spelling a product’s name backwards conferred some medicinal benefit), Noxzema (for which read: ‘knocks eczema’) Preparation H, Murine eyedrops and Dr Scholl’s Foot Aids.*28 It truly was an age of miracles – one in which you could even cure a smoker’s cough by smoking, so long as it was Old Golds you smoked, because, as the slogan proudly if somewhat untruthfully boasted, they contained ‘Not a cough in a carload’. (As late as 1953, L&M was advertising its cigarettes as ‘just what the doctor ordered!’)
By 1927 advertising was a $1.5 billion a year industry in the United States, and advertising people held in such awe that they were asked not only to mastermind campaigns but even to name the products. An ad man named Henry N. McKinney, for instance, named Keds shoes, Karo syrup, Meadow Gold butter and Uneeda Biscuits.10
Product names tended to cluster around certain sounds. Breakfast cereals often ended in -ies (Wheeties, Rice Krispies, Frosties); washing powders and detergents tended to be gravely monosyllabic (Lux, Fab, Tide). It is often possible to tell the era of a product’s development by its ending. Thus products dating from the 1920s and early 1930s often ended in -ex (Pyrex, Cutex, Kleenex, Windex) while those ending in -master (Mixmaster, Toastmaster) generally betray a late 1930s or early 1940s genesis.11 The development of Glo-Coat floor wax in 1932 also heralded the beginning of American business’s strange and longstanding infatuation with illiterate spellings, a trend that continued with ReaLemon juice in 1935, Reddi-Wip whipped cream in 1947 and many hundreds of others since, from Tastee-Freez drive-ins to Toys ‘R’ Us, along with countless others with a Kwik, E-Z or U (as in While-U-Wait) embedded in their titles. The late 1940s saw the birth of a brief vogue for endings in -matic, so that car manufacturers had Seat-O-Matics and Cruise-O-Matics, and even fitted sheets came with Ezy-Matic Corners. Some companies became associated with certain types of names. DuPont, for instance, had a special fondness for words ending in -on. The practice began with nylon – a name that was concocted out of thin air and owes nothing to its chemical properties – and was followed with Rayon, Dacron, Orlon and Teflon, among many others, though in more recent years the company has abandoned the practice and moved into what might be called its Star Trek phase with such intergalactic compounds as Tyvek, Kevlar, Sontara, Cordura, Nomex and Zemorain.
Such names have more than passing importance to their owners. If American business has given us more than our share of anxiety, we may draw some comfort from the thought that business has suffered anxiety of its own protecting the names of those products.
A certain cruel paradox prevails in the matter of preserving brand names. Every business naturally wants to create a product that will dominate its market, but if that product so dominates the market that the brand name becomes indistinguishable in the public mind from the product itself – when people begin to ask for a ‘thermos’ rather than a ‘Thermos brand vacuum flask’ – then the term has become generic and the owner faces the loss of its trademark protection. That is why advertisements and labels so often carry faintly paranoid-sounding lines like ‘Tabasco is the registered trademark for the brand of pepper sauce made by McIllhenny Co.’, and why companies like Coca-Cola suffer palpitations when they see a passage like this (from John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus):
‘Got any coke?’ another character asked.
‘No,’ said the proprietor. ‘Few bottles of Pepsi-Cola.
Haven’t had any coke for a month ... It’s the same stuff.
You can’t tell them apart.’12
An understandable measure of confusion exists concerning the distinction between patents and trademarks and between trademarks and trade names. A patent protects the name of the product and its method of manufacture for seventeen years. Thus from 1895 to 1912, no one but the Shredded Wheat Company could m
ake shredded wheat. Because patents require manufacturers to divulge the secrets of their products and thus give rivals the opportunity to copy them, companies sometimes choose not to seek their protection. Coca-Cola for one has never been patented.13 Trademark is effectively the name of a product, its brand name. Trade name is the name of the manufacturer. So Ford is a trade name, Escort a trademark. Trademarks apply not just to names, but also to logos, drawings and other such symbols and depictions. The MGM lion, for instance, is a trademark. Unlike patents, trademarks have indefinite protection in America.
For a long time, it was felt that this permanence gave the holder an unfair advantage. In consequence, America did not enact its first trademark law until 1870, almost a century after Britain and even then the American law was thrown out as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Lasting trademark protection did not begin for American companies until 1881. Today the number of trademarks on issue in America is something over 1 million, and is rising by about 30,000 a year.
A good trademark is almost incalculably valuable. Invincible-seeming brand names do occasionally falter and fade. Pepsodent, Oxydol, Sal Hepatica and Burma-Shave all once stood on the commanding heights of consumer recognition. For the most part, however, once a product establishes a dominant position in a market, it is exceedingly difficult to depose it. In 19 out of 22 product categories, the company that owned the leading American brand in 1925 still has it today – Nabisco in cookies, Kellogg’s in breakfast cereals, Kodak in film, Sherwin Williams in paint, Del Monte in canned fruit, Wrigley’s in chewing-gum, Singer in sewing-machines, Ivory in soap, Campbell’s in soup, Gillette in razors. A well-established brand name has a sort of self-perpetuating power. As a 1991 article in The Economist noted: ‘In the category of food blenders, consumers were still ranking General Electric second twenty years after the company had stopped making them.’14
An established brand name is so valuable that only about 5 per cent of the 16,000 or so new products introduced in America each year bear all-new brand names. The others are variants on an existing product – Tide with Bleach, Tropicana Twister Light Fruit Juices and so on. Among some types of product a certain glut is evident. At last count there were 220 types of branded breakfast cereal in America. In 1993, according to an international business survey, the world’s most valuable brand was Marlboro, with a value estimated at $40 billion, slightly ahead of Coca-Cola. Among the other top ten brands were Intel, Kellogg’s, Budweiser, Pepsi, Gillette and Pampers. Nescafé and Bacardi were the only foreign companies to make the top ten, underlining American dominance in brands.15
Huge amounts of effort go into choosing brand names. General Foods reviewed 2,800 names before deciding on Dreamwhip.16 (And to put this in proportion try to think of just ten names for an artificial whipped cream.) Ford considered more than 20,000 possible car names before finally settling on Edsel – which proves that such care doesn’t always pay – and Standard Oil a similar number before it opted for Exxon. Sometimes, however, the most successful names are the result of a moment’s whimsy. Betty Crocker came in a flash to an executive of the Washburn Crosby Company (later absorbed by General Mills), who chose Betty because he thought it sounded wholesome and sincere and Crocker in memory of a beloved fellow executive who had recently died. At first the name was used only to sign letters responding to customers’ requests for advice or information, but by the 1950s Betty Crocker’s smiling, confident face was appearing on more than fifty types of food product, and her loyal followers could buy her recipe books and even visit her ‘kitchen’ at the General Foods headquarters.
Even greater efforts go into finding out why people buy the brands they do. Advertisers and market researchers bandy about terms like conjoint analysis technique, personal drive patterns, Gaussian distributions, fractals, and other such arcana in their quest to winnow out every subliminal quirk of American buying habits. They know, for instance, that 40 per cent of all people who move to a new address will also change their brand of toothpaste, that the average supermarket shopper makes fourteen impulse decisions in each visit, that 62 per cent of shoppers will pay a premium for mayonnaise even when they think a cheaper brand is just as good, but that only 24 per cent will show the same largely irrational loyalty to frozen vegetables. To preserve a brand name involves a certain fussy attention to linguistic and orthographic details. To begin with, the name is normally expected to be treated not as a noun but as a proper adjective – that is, the name should be followed by an explanation of what it does: Kleenex facial tissues, Q-Tip cotton swabs, ]ell-O brand gelatin dessert, Sanka brand decaffeinated coffee. Some types of products – notably cars – are granted an exemption, which explains why General Motors does not have to advertise Cadillac self-driving automobiles or the like. In all cases, the name may not explicitly describe the product’s function, though it may hint at what it does. Thus Coppertone is acceptable; Coppertan would not be.
The situation is more than a little bizarre. Having done all they can to make their products household words, manufacturers must then in their advertisements do all in their power to imply that they aren’t. Before trademark law was clarified, advertisers positively encouraged the public to treat their products as generics. Kodak invited consumers to ‘Kodak as you go’, turning the brand name into a dangerously ambiguous verb. It would never do that now. The American Thermos Product Company went so far as to boast ‘Thermos is a household word’, to its considerable cost. Donald F. Duncan, Inc., the original manufacturer of the Yo-Yo, lost its trademark protection partly because it was amazingly casual about capitalization in its own promotional literature. ‘In case you don’t know what a yo-yo is ...’ one of its advertisements ran, suggesting that in commercial terms Duncan did not. Duncan also made the elemental error of declaring, ‘If It Isn’t A Duncan, It Isn’t a Yo-Yo’, which on the face of it would seem a reasonable claim, but was in fact held by the courts to be inviting the reader to consider the product generic.17 Kodak had long since stopped saying ‘If it isn’t an Eastman, it isn’t a Kodak.’
Because of the confusion, and occasional lack of fastidiousness on the part of their owners, many dozens of products have lost their trademark protection, among them aspirin, linoleum, yo-yo, thermos, cellophane, milk of magnesia, mimeograph, lanolin, celluloid, dry ice, escalator, shredded wheat, kerosene and zipper. All were once proudly capitalized and worth a fortune.
II
On 1 July 1941 the New York television station WNBT-TV interrupted its normal viewing to show, without comment, a Bulova watch ticking. For sixty seconds the watch ticked away mysteriously, then the picture faded and normal programming resumed. It wasn’t much, but it was the first television commercial.
Both the word and the idea were already well established. The first commercial – the term was used from the very beginning – had been broadcast by radio station WEAF in New York on 28 August 1922. It lasted for either ten or fifteen minutes, depending on which source you credit. Commercial radio was not an immediate hit. In its first two months, WEAF sold only $550 worth of air-time. But by the mid-1920s, sponsors were not only flocking to buy air-time but naming their programmes after their products – The Lucky Strike Hour, The A&P Gypsies, The Lux Radio Theater and so on.18 Such was the obsequiousness of the radio networks that by the early 1930s many were allowing the sponsors to take complete artistic and production control of the programmes. Many of the most popular shows were actually written by the advertising agencies, and the agencies seldom missed an opportunity to work a favourable mention of the sponsor’s products into the scripts.
With the rise of television in the 1950s, the practices of the radio era were effortlessly transferred to the new medium. Advertisers inserted their names into the programme title – Texaco Star Theater, Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, Chesterfield Sound-Off Time, The US Steel Hour, Kraft Television Theater, The Chevy Show, The Alcoa Hour, The Ford Star Jubilee, Dick Clark’s Beechnut Show and the arresting hybrid The Lux-Schlitz Playhouse, which seeme
d to suggest a cosy symbiosis between soapflakes and beer. The commercial dominance of programme titles reached a kind of hysterical peak with a programme officially called Your Kaiser-Frazer Dealer Presents Kaiser-Frazer Adventures in Mystery.19 Sponsors didn’t write the programmes any longer, but they did impose a firm control on the contents, most notoriously during a 1959 Playhouse 90 broadcast of Judgement at Nuremberg, when the sponsor, the American Gas Association, managed to have all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews removed from the script.
Where commercial products of the late 1940s had scientific-sounding names, those of the 1950s relied increasingly on secret ingredients. Gleem toothpaste contained a mysterious piece of alchemy called GL-70. Consumers were never given the slightest hint of what GL-70 was, but it would, according to the advertising, not only rout odour-causing bacteria but ‘wipe out their enzymes!’*29
A kind of creeping illiteracy invaded advertising too, to the dismay of many. When Winston began advertising its cigarettes with the slogan ‘Winston tastes good like a cigarette should’, nationally syndicated columnists like Sydney J. Harris wrote anguished essays on what the world was coming to – every educated person knew it should be ‘as a cigarette should’ – but the die was cast. By 1958 Ford was advertising that you could ‘travel smooth’ in a Thunderbird Sunliner and the maker of Ace Combs was urging buyers to ‘comb it handsome’ – a trend that continues today with ‘pantihose that fits you real comfortable’ and other grammatical manglings too numerous and dispiriting to dwell on.
We may smile at the advertising ruses of the 1920s – frightening people with the threat of ‘fallen stomach’ and ‘scabby toes’ – but in fact such creative manipulation still goes on, albeit at a slightly more sophisticated level. The New York Times Magazine reported in 1990 how an advertising copywriter had been told to come up with some impressive labels for a putative hand cream. She invented the arresting and healthful-sounding term oxygenating moisturizers, and wrote accompanying copy with references to ‘tiny bubbles of oxygen that release moisture into your skin’. This done, the advertising was turned over to the company’s research and development department, which was instructed to come up with a product that matched the copy.20
