“On the dance floor, results of over-indulgence are quickly revealed — causing embarrassment not only to one’s dancing partner but also to other dancers by encroaching on more than a fair share of space on a crowded or, as is often the case, on a dance floor of limited proportions. Dancers today, when tempted to overindulge at the punch bowl or the buffet, reach for a cigarette instead.” — Arthur Murray, June 30, 1930
The man responsible for eliciting the above quote from the famous dance instructor was one Edward Bernays. In the early 1930s, American Tobacco Company, maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes, wanted to double its market share by increasing the number of women smokers. The head of the company believed the quickest way to drive up the number of women smokers was to emphasize the weight-loss-or-maintenence benefits of cigarettes. The company’s slogan: “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.” The company’s PR man: Bernays.
Bernays, credited with being “the father of public relations,” was one of the first to develop the sorts of tactics later used by Hill & Knowlton to sell the first Iraq war or by countless industry front, or astroturf (fake grass-roots) groups.
In The Father of Spin, which I am currently reading, Larry Tye reveals some of the many strategies Bernays drummed up, which are just too remarkably ingenious and fascinating not to share.
Before necessarily advertising cigarettes as the haute couture diet, Bernays needed to make sure that slimness was on everyone’s mind in the first place. Obviously, the ideal flapper figure of the 1920s meant that slimness was already en vogue, but just to be sure, Bernays recruited experts to advocate thinness and produced “surveys” of photographers, actors, athletes, etc., revealing that “the slender woman who, combining suppleness and grace with slenderness, who instead of overeating sweets and deserts, lights a cigarette, has created a new standard of female loveliness.” The surveys were then forwarded on to major newspapers as independent studies with no connection linking them to the tobacco company, of course.*
The next step, then, was to encourage people to trade in their chocolates for lucky strikes, which would seem a bit too pat if advocated by lucky strike. So Bernays recruited the chief of the British Association of Medical Officers of Health to advise that “the correct way to finish a meal is with fruit, coffee, and a cigarette” in order to prevent gum decay and sooth the nerves. He urged hotels to to add cigarettes to their dessert lists. He got the editors of House and Garden to prepare and distribute a menu to help people lose weight that suggested a sensible mix of vegetables, meats, etc., followed by “a cigarette instead of dessert.” He advocated for kitchen cabinet makers to build special cigarette drawers in new kitchens, and ran a campaign for the new housewife to know how to keep her husband happy by always keeping the cigarette drawer stocked. He created the Ziegfeld Contour, Curve and Charm Club, composed of six Zigfeld Follies dancers, who pledged “to renounce the false pleasure of the table” and smoke cigarettes instead. He even wrote jokes related to slimness and smoking and (under pseudonyms, obviously) had them published in The New Yorker and Life.
The man (who claimed to be a feminist, p.s.) may be responsible for countless eating disorders and bouts of lung cancer, but damn if all of that isn’t mind-bogglingly clever. To conduct a PR campaign on so many fronts …. I suppose many of the tactics seem quite commonplace today, but this was very novel for the time. And I don’t think many have done it better than Bernays ever since. The man got bacon and eggs to become a national breakfast staple and helped overthrow a socialist regime in Guatemala in order to sell more bananas!
More tidbits about Bernays tobacco efforts:
The next step of Bernays women-smoking campaign was to latch on to the emerging feminist movement. At the time, it was still sort of uncouth for women to smoke out on the streets. So Bernays organized a parade of prominent women who would walk down Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday, smoking their “torches of freedom.” Right, this sounds corny. But remember that at the time, smoking was a feminist statement, an anything-guys-can-do-we-can-do-too activity in the same vein as drinking and wearing pants.
Bernays hand-selected the women who would be part of the parade — “actresses should be out … while they should be goodlooking, they should not look too model-y .. young women who stand for feminism …could be secured.” He choreographed it down to every moment: one woman lights a cigarette, another sees her, goes to ask her for a lighter, lights up too…. etc. The event got picked up by newspapers nationwide, and sparked debate amongst women’s clubs and on the editorial pages. And the whole thing never (or, at least not for many, many years) got traced back to Bernays and American Tobacco.
In another campaign, when surveys revealed that women were less likely to smoke lucky strikes because they came in a green and red box that clashed with their evening wear, Bernays actually started a campaign for the color green: organizing a Green Ball thrown at the Waldorf Astoria and ostensibly thrown by the chairwoman of the Women’s Infirmary of New York, with all proceeds going to charity.
Once the ball was in order, he persuaded glove and jewelry and silk and purse companies that they should manufacture accesssories to match the green dresses debutantes at the ball would be wearing. He recruited president of the Onondaga Silk Company to host a Green Fashions Fall luncheon for New York fashion editors. Under the auspices of the silk company, he organized the Color Fashion Bureau to advise interior decorators, home-furnishing buyers and merchandise managers of this new trend. Before long, the New York Sun and the Post were predicting “a Green Winter.” The Green Ball, and the emergence of Green that fall, was also not linked to Bernays or American Tobacco.
Fun facts about PR, kids. Fun facts about PR….
** a practice which has become frustratingly commonplace, I can tell you, having seen my fair share of press releases for “scientific” studies advocating preposterously everything during my tenure at a daily paper
[...] are the ones behind all this lost-womanhood-we-love-babies-gender-bending nonsense. A stealth, Bernays-like advertising campaign by the feminine-hygeine-products cabal would make a lot more sense than [...]