Made In America - Bill Bryson [155]
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