Have you ever wondered how we ended up with so much... stuff? While many people that have contributed to this, one man arguably had the biggest impact of all on what the world buys - and why...
Edward Bernays was born in 1891 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, but moved to America as a child. As a young man he pursued journalism and theatre promotion in New York. When the US joined the First World War in 1917, he joined other publicists at the Committee on Public Information (CPI), generating pro-war propaganda for domestic audiences and promoting the US abroad.
The CPI was wildly successful. President Woodrow Wilson was so impressed with Bernays' techniques that he invited him to the Paris Peace Conference in 1918. In Paris, Bernays saw first-hand the power of his propaganda techniques, which had transformed Wilson into a 'great liberator.' His mind was whirring... could the same techniques be adapted for peacetime?
It transpired that - yes - propaganda is very powerful in peacetime, just as long as you don't call it propaganda. After the war, Bernays set up the first 'Public Relations’ agency in New York. Boosted by a copy of Psychoanalysis by his uncle Sigmund Freud, he realised that rational arguments did not win customers. Sellers needed to appeal to their feelings.
The first sector that Bernays helped was car manufacturers, which had a new problem. Everyone who could afford a car in the US had already bought one. Stock was piling up and factories risked being shuttered. Bernays' solution was to re-brand cars as symbols of male vitality. He told his client, General Motors, to launch new models every year... bigger, faster, more luxurious. Henry Ford, who had sold 50% of all cars in the world at that point, hated this tactic - later coined 'planned obsolescence.' Ford had a good point. We can see its effects everywhere today, from mobile phones to fast fashion.
Talking of fashion, Bernays organised shows at new department stores to promote clothes, not as protection against the elements, but as statements of social class. This approach soon spread to other products, helped by another of his inventions, product placement. Bernays was also the first to use what we would now call a 'flash-mob.' In 1929 he paid women in New York's Easter Parade to suddenly start smoking, a big taboo at the time. It was presented as a spontaneous protest, but was orchestrated by Bernays and his client Lucky Strike. They re-branded cigarettes as 'freedom torches,' not the habit of 'immoral women.'
Later, Lucky Strike noticed that women were choosing competing brands. Bernays traced the low sales to the green packaging, an unpopular colour at the time. Lucky Strike wouldn't change the colour, so Bernays changed public perception instead. He organised a 'Green Ball,' full of glittering celebrities in aspirational green designs. Academics and business leaders were invited to speak about the 'benefits of green,' real or contrived. Bernays and Lucky Strike kept out of view, making the Green Ball, like the smoking protest, appear spontaneous.
Not content with making Americans buy more cars, cigarettes and clothes, Bernays also enlisted the 'help' of his doctor to promote breakfast as the 'most important meal of the day.' Using reasoning now known to be false, he convinced the doctor to write to 5000 others asking if they agreed. 4500 wrote back, giving Bernays the 'expert' ammunition he needed to promote the benefits of large breakfasts in the press. But why? Well... entirely coincidentally, Bernays was working for a bacon manufacturer at the same time. Its bacon adverts were placed in or near the 'big breakfast' coverage, making the connection appear entirely natural... and sales to rise. Americans swapped coffee and toast for bacon and eggs and nobody noticed.
While some of these approaches push the bounds of acceptability, Bernays also stepped well over the line too. In the 1950s a revolution in Guatemala gave workers at United Fruit new rights, including the right to strike. This threatened profits, so Bernays helped paint the new government as 'communist.' The US government interfered, the revolution was toppled and workers could be exploited again. And that's not even the worst of it. Bernays was Jewish, but that didn't stop Josef Goebbels learning a lot from his books. In a staggering case of unintended consequences, Bernays accidentally helped Germany turn into Nazi Germany.
Bernays lived until 1995, long enough to see the effects of his approaches on the world. He maintained that he acted in the best interests of society as a whole, although critics point to the fact that it was the companies he worked for that gained the most. Big tobacco, pharmaceutical companies and oil giants honed and improved upon his approaches, causing great damage to individuals and the environment in his wake, not to mention incredible volumes of waste obsolete products. 100 years on, the world has been transformed by Edward Bernays, part maverick, part publicist, part psychologist, part marketer and part brainwasher. We should beware of the forces that he unleashed.
