Made In America (46 page)

Early in the 1900s, advertisers discovered another perennial feature of marketing – the
giveaway
as it was called almost from the start. Consumers soon became acquainted with the irresistibly tempting notion that if they bought a particular product they could expect a reward – the chance to win prizes, to receive a free book (almost always ostensibly dedicated to the general improvement of one’s well-being but invariably a thinly disguised plug for the manufacturer’s range of products), receive a free sample, or a rebate in the form of a shiny dime. Typical of the genre was a turn-of-the-century tome called
The Vital Question Cook Book,
which was promoted as an aid to livelier meals, but which proved upon receipt to contain 112 pages of recipes all involving the use of Shredded Wheat. Many of these had a certain air of desperation about them, notably the ‘Shredded Wheat Biscuit Jellied Apple Sandwich’ and the ‘Creamed Spinach on Shredded Wheat Biscuit Toast’. Almost all in fact involved nothing more than spooning some everyday food on to a piece of shredded wheat and giving it an inflated name. None the less, the company distributed no fewer than four million copies of
The Vital Question Cook Book
to eager consumers.

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
):

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 make 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.