Larry Tye on Edward Bernays: "The Father of Public Relations"

6 feb · A History of Marketing

A History of Marketing / Episode 5

This week, my guest is author Larry Tye, who is best known for his biographies of iconic figures of American history. Tye's book "The Father of Spin" is the definitive biography of Edward L. Bernays, who is often called "The Father of Public Relations."

This excerpt from The Father of Spin provides a glimpse at the historic life of Bernays:

”Edward Bernays almost single-handedly fashioned the craft that has come to be called public relations. Bernays was the man who, more than any other, got women to smoke cigarettes, put bacon and eggs on the breakfast table, Ivory in soap dishes, books in bookshelves, and Calvin Coolidge back in the White House. Although most Americans have never heard of Edward Bernays, he nevertheless had a profound impact on everything from the products they purchased to the places they visited and the foods they ate for breakfast.”

Larry Tye is a New York Times best-selling author who penned biographies of Bobby Kennedy, Joe McCarthy, Satchel Paige, and Superman. His latest book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America, was published in 2024 to great reviews.

Larry joined me for a deep dive into his book, The Father of Spin, which is an excellent biography of Edward Bernays.

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In this conversation, we explore the amazing life of Bernays, including:

* Eddie’s close relationship with his uncle, Sigmund Freud and how psychoanalysis influenced his PR campaigns

* Marketing cigarettes to women under the guise of a feminist movement

* His propaganda campaign against the government of Guatemala on behalf of his client, the United Fruit Company, leading to a military coup backed by the CIA

* And much more!

Read the interview transcript, enhanced with links, images, and videos:

Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.

Introduction to Edward L. Bernays

Andrew Mitrak: Larry, thank you so much for joining us.

Larry Tye: Great to be with you, Andrew.

Andrew Mitrak: Today, we're going to travel back in time to your first book, The Father of Spin, which you published in 1998. It's the definitive biography of Edward L. Bernays, a truly fascinating man who's often called the father of public relations. I knew a little bit about the story of Bernays prior to reading your book and prior to doing this podcast. He's one of the reasons why I actually wanted to start this because this is a story that is not very well known today. So, how would you describe Bernays to someone who's never heard of him before?

Larry Tye: He was a guy who took his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas on why people behave the way they do and used it to try to transform that behavior on behalf of clients who ranged from American Presidents to the biggest corporations in the world to foreign leaders. He was somebody who developed all the skills of the art and the science of public relations in a way that reflected the best and the worst of that profession.

Andrew Mitrak: That's right. You really packed a lot in there. So we'll, of course, talk about his uncle Sigmund Freud and some of the best and the worst of his career as well. And so for you personally, prior to writing this book, you were a reporter working for the Boston Globe, and this was your first full-length book. Why Bernays? Of all the things you could have chosen to spend, I'm sure, years on to write your first book, why did you choose Eddie Bernays?

Larry Tye: So, I could give you the high-minded answer, which was that as a journalist, I was always fascinated by public relations. At times in my life as a journalist, I would depend on PR people on a deadline to get me to the right sources and to get my story completed, and at times I spent running away from PR people. So I was trying to understand the two ends of that profession. That would be the high-minded answer.

The truthful answer is that I was doing this incredible year-long fellowship called the Nieman, which is where 12 American and 12 overseas journalists are invited to spend a year at Harvard doing essentially anything they want. And at the end of that year, we were all in panic mode. And the panic was because we had been told for a year that we were Cinderella, and we were about to be going back to work and becoming char ladies again. And so we all wanted to try to figure out a way of making that magical year go on.

I was at one of the things that we learned to do pretty well during that Nieman year, which was go to cocktail parties. And I was at a cocktail party at my creative writing teacher's home. And the creative writing teacher was a woman named Anne Bernays, and her husband was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer named Justin Kaplan. A couple beers into that evening, I heard Justin say if his father-in-law wasn't his father-in-law, he would be writing his biography. And I wanted to know something about who his father-in-law was. And the next morning, I was at the doorstep of 102-year-old Edward Bernays.

He was taking me on a tour of his house, and I was contemplating the notion of being his biographer, only partly because I thought he was a fascinating character, but more because I thought writing a book would be a way of my getting to take another special year off doing what I wanted to do. And about three months after that visit to Edward Bernays, I had signed up a book agent, and my book agent was in the process of signing up a publisher, and I was on my way to getting another year off.

Meeting 102-year-old Edward Bernays

Andrew Mitrak: Well, let's jump to this about your encounter with Bernays. As I was researching Edward Bernays and in your book, I was looking at YouTube videos of him, which are amazing. They're preserved, recorded in the late '80s, so not quite at 102 years old, but pretty close. And you can even watch him on the David Letterman show, which is just wild. It feels like an anachronism. Eddie Bernays started his career before World War I. He worked with Thomas Edison and Calvin Coolidge, and here he is with David Letterman, a TV personality that I know and enjoy today. You met Edward Bernays at the end of his life. What was that like? What were your takeaways of him? What impression did he leave on you?

Larry Tye: There are two things I was struck by. One was how we went into his study, what his grandchildren called his ego room, and he showed me pictures of him, as you say, with Thomas Alva Edison, with Henry Ford, with President Calvin Coolidge. It was Eddie Bernays and everybody famous that he had known and worked for and helped influence. And I thought that was unusual. I thought that PR people were supposed to stay in the background, and the idea that the pictures were all with Eddie Bernays in them suggested the unusual kind of PR guy that he was, who was somebody who believed, and maybe rightfully believed, that his story was as important as these titans of industry and American Presidents.

The other thing that struck me about him was that age 102, knowing that his potential biographer was coming to visit him, he had put on his best suit and his tie and was looking absolutely perfect, except when I looked down at his feet, and he hadn't quite at age 102 been able to pull it all together, and he had two different color socks on. And I thought that was a reflection of the fact that he was showing a little bit of vulnerability to the fact that he was that old, but that he also had been waiting his entire life, had been waiting 102 years essentially, for somebody to come along and tell his story, and he wanted to make sure that he got it right, or that I got it right, and that I saw all the things that made him special. And he told me amazing stories, but I realized partway through the interview that it was like I was clicking button number three, and that was Eddie Bernays and Thomas Edison. He had told these stories so many times that it dawned on me that I was getting a partly rote version of the story, and I tried my hardest during that time with him to get him off message and relaxing a bit and telling a story in a way that seemed original rather than version number 75 of the same story.

Andrew Mitrak: I suppose that speaks both to his discipline as a PR person, sticking to the same story, but also his habit of being a self-promoter, of having spent, you know, decades telling these stories and using these to promote himself.

The "Professional Nephew": How Bernays Applied Freud's Theories to Public Relations

Andrew Mitrak: You already brought up his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and I think that's probably a good place to start as we get into his biography. You write, and I quote,

"Bernays had strong familial ties to the venerated psychologist. His mother was Freud's sister, and his father's sister was Freud's wife."

And I had to reread this a few times to make sure that there was nothing incestuous going on here, but it is totally fine. It's thinking of him as being sort of Freud's nephew in two different ways. Can you share more about his relationship with Freud?

Larry Tye: He was, as you point out, a double nephew, either through his mother or through his father, whichever he was choosing to point to. He had an especially close relationship to Sigmund Freud, and when he was a kid, he loved going to Vienna and doing long walks in the mountains with Uncle Siggy, as he called him. But it was a special relationship in a number of ways. One was that Sigmund Freud was partly in Eddie Bernays' debt, that when the Nazis were closing in on Sigmund Freud in the era of Adolf Hitler, it was Eddie Bernays who got his works translated into English and earned enough money through that translation from the publisher that he could help Freud escape the Germans' closing vice and make his way to England.

But Bernays also shocked his uncle. His uncle was a very buttoned-down, Viennese, old-world character, and Eddie Bernays wanted to translate Freud's ideas, his complicated ideas on psychotherapy, into little ditties that he could sell to American men and women in a way that would make him a mass-marketed commodity, and Freud was shocked by that. So he was grateful, he was shocked. It was a classic reaction to Eddie Bernays. It was a reaction to the good and the bad of who Eddie Bernays was, and in the end, what mattered was Bernays helped Freud stay alive, and everybody appreciated that.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, one of the things you write is that Bernays dropped Sigmund Freud's name so much that Variety dubbed him a "professional nephew" and that Eddie borrowed his uncle's insights into symbols and other forces that motivate people, using them as building blocks for the art and science of public relations. So what were some of the top lessons from psychology that Bernays brought to his work?

Larry Tye: Bernays was essentially a professional nephew. In the first five minutes that you met him, he would manage to drop Sigmund Freud's name and lots of other names. He really did study more than anybody had ever done the psychology of people's behaviors in a way of trying to understand how to shift them. Let me give you a concrete example.

Torches of Freedom: How Bernays Got Women to Smoke Cigarettes by Exploiting Feminism

Larry Tye: When he, in one of his most famous campaigns, he was representing the biggest manufacturer of cigarettes in America, the American Tobacco Company. And American Tobacco had done a great job through its publicity of addicting a generation of American men to smoking cigarettes, but there was the other half of the American population, women, and it was considered a social taboo. It was unladylike for women to pick up a cigarette. And Eddie Bernays wanted to change that.

So he went to a disciple of Uncle Sigmund's, a guy named Dr. A.A. Brill, and he said, "What do cigarettes represent to women in America?" And Brill talked about this taboo, the idea that that women weren't considered elegant and ladylike if they picked up a cigarette. So Eddie Bernays set off to change that, and he did that by orchestrating a march down Fifth Avenue, America's premier boulevard, on Easter Sunday, a holiday that represented religious freedom.

And he had these very elegant debutantes pull out cigarettes as they were marching, and he had ensured that photographers would be there waiting, knowing something magnificent was about to happen. And so in newspapers all across the world the day after Easter Sunday, there were pictures of these elegant women elegantly lighting up their cigarettes. And he wanted in one quick, staged event to transform the image of what cigarettes were. Instead of being something that was unladylike, he wanted it to be the symbol of elegance, and it worked. It worked enough that women slowly started coming around and buying American Tobacco products, and especially their number one selling cigarette, Lucky Strike. And lighting up cigarettes became, instead of a taboo for women, it became a sign of liberation. And there was actually a whole brand of cigarettes, Virginia Slims, that developed this theme of women being liberated by lighting up their slim cigarettes and looking elegant the way Bernays wanted them to.

“Big Think” & Horizontal Thinking: Bernays' Indirect Approach to Public Relations

Andrew Mitrak: This is a really great example of what you call the "big think" and the indirect approach that Bernays takes, and that he's hitching private interests to public ones. Instead of at the start just saying these cigarettes taste great or they're relaxing and they look good for women, he starts with a more indirect approach of tying it to women's liberation and women's rights, and it's a torch of freedom. Can you speak to this strategy of “big think” and this indirect approach that Bernays took to his work?

Larry Tye: So you're exactly right, first of all, about cigarettes, and it became known as the Torches of Freedom Campaign. But there was another element to it that also became classic Eddie Bernays, which is nobody was supposed to know that those women were recruited by Bernays, that it was supposed to be seen as an ad hoc, an ad-libbed, a spontaneous lighting up of cigarettes, and instead, it was all concocted by Eddie Bernays. He was a hidden hand, and he wanted to keep his hands hidden in this case.

But it was an approach that I call horizontal thinking. Let's take another example. When he went to work for the biggest book publishers in America, it was everybody from Random House to Simon & Schuster, to all the big publishers. And Eddie Bernays said, "You have to get out of your conventional thinking of how to sell more books." Conventional thinking would have been you lower the price a bit, and you have a bunch of ads, and that's a way to get Americans to buy more books. And that was what I call vertical thinking. One step leads logically to the next. Horizontal thinking, of the way that Eddie Bernays looked at a campaign like that, was to get people to re-envision the product itself.

And so what he did was he went to the leading home builders and designers in America with a very simple question. He said, "Are books important to American civilization?" Now, I'm not sure what American civilization even means, but the idea of books being important to something as high-minded as civilization was a no-brainer, and all these architects and home builders said, "Of course, books are important to American civilization." And Eddie Bernays took the results of his survey and went around to builders and designers who hadn't been part of his survey and said, "You can strike a blow for American civilization if the next home that you build or apartment that you design, you include built-in bookshelves."

It was something that hadn't been standard in any homes, and now we know that homes of a certain era all included built-in bookshelves, and that became part of what was in people's homes. And you're not going to fill a bookshelf with cereal boxes or with cigarettes. You're going to put books into a bookshelf.

Bernays figured if he could have books as part of the decoration, as part of the fabric of houses, you were going to sell more books because people wanted to buy the books to put in the bookshelves to show the world how literate they were. And when you go to people's homes, one of the standard things that I do when I go into somebody's home is I look at the books that are in their living room bookshelf, and I'm intrigued by what they're reading, and Eddie Bernays understood that that would happen.

And it worked brilliantly for publishers. Suddenly, they were not just selling books with the conventional and the old-hat method of putting them on a discount because that discount at some point would have to go away, or they wouldn't make money, that it became part of American homes to sell more books. And that was horizontal thinking, and it was big-think thinking, and it was Eddie Bernays' thinking that transformed the profession of public relations. He called himself the father, but if father means the first, he wasn't the first, but he was the most artful and the most scientific and the most successful.

Andrew Mitrak: I have a home that was built back then, and I have built-in bookshelves. So I wonder, “Was that some of Eddie's influence there?”

Larry Tye: So you have bookshelves, and what do you have in your bookshelves?

Andrew Mitrak: Well, at a time, I had books. But now I have toddlers, so now it's a random collection of some of their toys and things that we have. We've kind of given up on having a nice, presentable home. But yes – before kids, it was books.

For Better and For Worse: Addressing the Morality Behind Bernays PR Campaigns

Andrew Mitrak: Comparing, contrasting this versus the Torches of Freedom example – there was sort of using his powers for good – reading – and bad – cigarettes. These are just so illustrative of how he's using some of the same techniques for his clients regardless of the morality behind it.

Larry Tye: That is true. Eddie Bernays was value-neutral, the same way public relations as a profession is. It can be used to promote the best causes in the world or the most insidious causes in the world. And one of the things that happened as a result of his campaign to addict women to the same vice that men had been addicted to, of cigarettes, what happened was that women's lung cancer rates caught up to men's rates. And he knew the health risk in a way that very few people in America did back then. He had access to the biggest cigarette company in America and to all of their health studies. And at home, he was telling his daughters to take their mother's cigarettes and break them, as he said, "like brittle bones," and flush them down the toilet. And he was doing that at the same time he was trying to sell this bad habit to women all across the world.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, this is where it's hard to overlook Bernays' cynicism or maybe hypocrisy. So he knew as early as 1930 that what he was promoting as a form of women's liberation had this horrible health effect. Did Bernays in his life ever acknowledge this hypocrisy?

Larry Tye: He said later in life that he hadn't known. If he had known how dangerous cigarettes were to women and men, he would never have promoted them. But we now know, because of the papers that Eddie Bernays left behind, his own papers, that he absolutely knew about the health risks. And what he tried to do as a mea culpa later in life is this guy who had represented American Tobacco Company was suddenly representing the American Lung Association in trying to wean people off the very habit that he had created for them. And so the good news is that he did good in later life in trying to end the addiction. The bad news is that he created it in the first place, and he later lied about it.

The All-American Breakfast: How Bernays Made Bacon and Eggs a Staple

Andrew Mitrak: Before we kind of get to some of his later-in-life work, there are so many other examples of his indirect approach and some of his other greatest hits. One of the things you write is that when he was, quote,

"Hired to sell a product or service, he instead sold new ways of behaving, which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of American life."

And we've talked about bookshelves as texture, of course, smoking, kind of bad texture. Are there some of the other examples of his applications of this that come to mind?

Larry Tye: One of my favorites is when he went to work for the Beech-Nut Packing Company, and that was the big bacon maker. And he wanted to change the way people thought not just about bacon but about eating. And so what he did was he again took his technique of going out with a very simple question to a lot of eminent people. And the simple question was, "Is a hearty breakfast a good thing for people to eat?" Now, who knew what a hearty breakfast meant? But the very word "hearty" suggests that it's healthy, it's a robust meal to start your day. And he went out to leading health authorities, and he asked them, "Do you endorse a hearty breakfast?" And they all said yes. And he took that back and said, "A hearty breakfast is a bacon and eggs breakfast." And he gave the definition to what "hearty" was, which was a definition he had never told the doctors who he was surveying.

And the ultimate, as we know now, artery-clogging breakfast of a bacon and eggs breakfast had not been an all-American breakfast. In fact, much of America was dashing off to work, even in those days in the '30s and '40s and '50s, dashing off to work, downing a cup of coffee and maybe a slice of bread and a glass of orange juice if they had a little bit of extra time.

But Eddie Bernays said, "No, we want to have an all-American breakfast, the ultimate hearty breakfast." And now we know when you go into, when you're with your kids and you're taking them out for breakfast, everybody goes in and orders at their favorite diner or wherever their breakfast joint is, a bacon and eggs breakfast when they have time to do it. And we don't look at the fact that it's unhealthy.

We look at the fact that that somehow has a certain symbolism. It's a warmth, it's comfort food. Instead of again taking the conventional, the vertical approach of just trying to have publicity around people buying bacon, he changed the whole way we looked at what bacon was all about. And it was not just Beech-Nut, but all the bacon makers were selling more bacon because that was part of what Americans were eating more of for their all-American breakfast.

Andrew Mitrak: So instead of saying Beech-Nut bacon is the best, he never even attached his client's name to the promotion. It was more about growing the entire category or inventing this new category of a hearty breakfast, which, by the way, my client defines or meets the definition in the way that I define it, and that leads to their success.

Larry Tye: Yes, exactly that.

Marketing to Children: The Ivory Soap Campaign

Andrew Mitrak: We've talked about bookshelves, bacon. There's another B for Bernays, which is bath soap, which I thought was also a really clever use for that. Could you tell a story of how he managed to market and change opinions about bath soap?

Larry Tye: He was working for Procter & Gamble, which made the number one selling soap in the country. I don't know if it is anymore, but it was then, and it was Ivory Soap. And he decided that he looked at the behavior of American women, who were the ultimate shoppers back then, and he said, "How do they decide what soap to buy?" And one way was they took their kids often to the grocery store with them, and if kids picked out a particular kind of soap, that was the soap that they bought. He started thinking, "What is the way that I can get kids, who never think about the brand of product they're buying, how can I get them interested in something as prosaic as the kind of soap that their mothers buy?"

And he created this series of contests that became this thing, it was the ultimate fad in America, where there was a soap carving contest, and kids could win prizes, and it was sponsored by the biggest manufacturer in the country of household products, Procter & Gamble. And kids were rewarded with prizes that became a big thing in their school and in their after-school programs if they could carve Ivory Soap into the best-looking sculptures. And he didn't care about kids carving soap. He cared about kids wanting Ivory Soap because that was the soap that became the standard of eligibility for that contest. And suddenly, kids were going to the grocery store with their moms and saying, "We want Ivory Soap because that's what we can carve into something that can win us a prize." And Eddie Bernays again realized it wasn't just going to the women who were paying for the soap. It was going to the kids. If a mother saw that their kid wanted a particular kind of soap and might stay clean because of that, they were willing to buy any soap that the kid suggested, and the kid suggested Ivory.

Andrew Mitrak: At first, I thought this was an example of one of the more positive impacts of Bernays' work. You know, what's better than using soap? But as you mentioned that, I thought about it, and maybe this introduced an idea of marketing to children, which opens its own set of moral quandaries. And now we see toys that families don't need or high-sugar breakfast cereals being marketed towards kids, and them asking their parents for that. So maybe he has his fingerprints on that as well.

Larry Tye: He does. He has his fingerprints on just about everything that we are sold, on whether it is good or bad.

Behind the Scenes and in the Spotlight: Bernays' Passion for Self-Promotion

Andrew Mitrak: One of the many things that makes Bernays unique is that while most publicity people worked behind the scenes, he actively boosted his reputation. He wrote, quote, "In an era of mass communication, modesty is a private virtue and a public fault," end quote. And he wrote books around this. He wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion. He wrote a book called Propaganda. And while most people in his field were called press agents or publicity men. It sounds like he coined the term "public relations" and gave himself this title of "public relations counselor." So how did Eddie's peers or others in the industry or even his clients react to his habit of injecting himself into the story and being such a self-promoter?

Larry Tye: They thought he was shameless, and he was shameless. He actually wrote a book called Biography of an Idea, and what that was, it was probably the worst-selling book in the history of publishing. It was an entire book devoted to everywhere that Eddie Bernays had been quoted. He wanted to make sure that the world didn't miss a single smart thing or unsmart thing that he had ever said. So parts of the book were just about him being quoted in newspapers and in books and in magazines. And what he was really writing it for was an audience of one, and the one was the person that had ended up being me, as the first case who was going to write his biography. So he didn't want to trust that I was going to realize all the brilliant things he had said. He wanted to make sure that they were there and handed to me on this platter.

And the way his fellow practitioners back then, and there weren't many of them back then, and the way practitioners today look at him is, on the one hand, he's the most studied PR guy in courses on PR or marketing or advertising. And on the other hand, he's the one that everybody has a smile on their face when they talk about because they all realize that he is the one who convinced us that he was the father of public relations. Anytime you saw him quoted, including in his New York Times full-page obituary, he was referred to as the father. But as we were discussing, if father means first, there were people, including the famous Ivy Lee, who was hired by J.D. Rockefeller, there were people who came before him. But nobody wrote as much about the profession. Nobody mixed as artfully as Bernays did the art and the science of the profession. And nobody ensured that their name was out there in as many public forums as Eddie Bernays did.

And it was exactly the kind of thing. One of my best guides when I was writing the book was a man named Harold Burson, and he was one of the named people on what was at the time the biggest PR firm in the world, called Burson-Marsteller. And Harold Burson thought that Eddie Bernays was brilliant, but he thought that he was doing exactly the wrong thing. Burson believed, like most PR people, that their hand, they were being well-paid to be in the background, and it was the clients who wanted to be on center stage. And Eddie Bernays thought that he could have it both ways. He could be there alongside his client, and he could be seen as a genius. And Eddie Bernays also did something that public relations people are grateful to him for, which was he said, "The only way that you will get people like the President or like the heads of big companies to take us seriously is if we charge a fee that is equal to the salary that they're making." And so he ensured that PR people, nobody knew what they should be paying them, and he ensured that they made fat paychecks.

Doris Fleischman’s Role in the Bernays PR Empire

Andrew Mitrak: I'm sure his peers and colleagues appreciated that. One of the people, as he was self-promoting, somebody who he overlooked was his wife, Doris Fleischman, who sounds like she was really a big contributor behind the scenes to his work and was really a remarkable figure in her own right. Can you share who Doris was and what her role was in building the Bernays public relations empire?

Larry Tye: Her role was absolutely essential. The more eloquent that something that Bernays said was, the more likely it had been coined by Doris because she was at least as smart as he was. She was more articulate than he was, and she was more realistic on what could actually work. But it was partly the era, and that was an era where women weren't as involved in the professional world, and there was incredible gender bias back then.

And so Eddie Bernays did a whole lot to promote Doris's ideas but not to promote Doris. And we see when she left her papers to a library at Harvard University, we can see her genius, and there's been a wonderful biography written about Doris. And her daughters, their daughters were big on telling me just the very important role that Doris played, and they were always upset that their father never gave her the credit that she deserved.

But when they were married, he booked a room at the Waldorf-Astoria, this elegant old hotel in New York, and he promised her that he would be low-key about the wedding, and they were married at City Hall. But when they signed in on their wedding night at the Waldorf, he knew, because he had worked for the Waldorf, that if he had an unusual way of signing in, that this could become a news event. And the unusual way was signing in with his name and with her maiden name, and nobody did that in those days. Women changed their name, and she kept her name of Doris Fleischman. And having created that policy for the Waldorf, he knew that it would become a headline in the next day's papers, that a man and woman signed in with their names before they were married as their names after they were married, and their wedding became big news.

Andrew Mitrak: He never misses an opportunity. One of the other amazing facts about Doris, or just a really quirky fact, is that she was the first woman issued an American passport who was married but had her maiden name on it, which seems like just a family full of firsts and milestones there.

United Fruit Company vs. the Government of Guatemala: the Ultimate Public Relations Coup

Andrew Mitrak: The final story we'll cover of Bernays' career is maybe even a wilder and potentially darker story than his work with American Tobacco, and it's all about bananas. Could you just share what this story in this chapter of Bernays' career is about?

Larry Tye: This goes back to an era in American foreign policy where there were things that we knew, we referred to in that time as banana republics, and they were called banana republics, they were in Latin America, and they were called banana republics because the big fruit companies, like United Fruit that Eddie Bernays worked for, actually seemed to almost own these countries. They owned a huge chunk of the land. They were the biggest employer, and they could dictate the policy, the domestic and foreign policy of many of these countries. But something happened in one of these banana republics in Guatemala in the 1950s, and that is they elected a leftist as their leader. And United Fruit Company worried that he would expropriate their lands, and so they hired, they brought in their PR guy, Eddie Bernays, to try to do something about it.

And Eddie Bernays, who showed that he could affect people's behavior and what they bought, also showed through this campaign that he could elect, he could affect the behavior of America's foreign policy. He put out all kinds of propaganda suggesting this was a threat to American values by having this leftist government there. He encouraged the American government to go in quietly and try to undermine, in a way that nobody would know was the American government doing this, this leftist government.

And it was essentially testing out a policy that we would use later in Cuba when we went in and staged the Bay of Pigs invasion and tried to depose Fidel Castro, only in this case, it worked, and the leftist leader was tossed out of office in a totally undemocratic way. He had been elected democratically, and the free will of the people of Guatemala was undermined by Eddie Bernays, by the United Fruit Company, and by the Eisenhower administration. And it showed that there were no limits. Borders were no limit to what Eddie Bernays could do on behalf of whatever client he happened to represent. And in this case, it was fruit companies who exerted the kind of power that we disparaged by inventing this term "banana republics," but was actually what happened in these countries, not just in Latin America, but all across the world.

Andrew Mitrak: We have limited time together, but we could spend probably hours just talking about this story alone with United Fruit Company, which is, of course, now known as Chiquita Banana, and Samuel Zemurray, who's known as Sam the Banana Man, and this fascinating array of characters.

Bernays: The Unreliable Narrator and Verifying the Facts

As we wrap up on some of our look back on Bernays' work and his contributions to public relations, I kind of want to talk about Bernays as the unreliable narrator. Your book is The Father of Spin, and of course, he stretched the truth about his, for his clients, but he also embellished his own story. And in your book, you often tell the story from Bernays' perspective, but then you find accounts from others that typically cast some reasons to doubt some of the more self-aggrandizing claims. And we're sort of led to think that the truth is a little blurry. It's maybe directionally right, but in Bernays' case, a little less, "Hey, we did this parade, and suddenly women start smoking," or, "I do a propaganda campaign, and soon a democratically elected government in Guatemala is overthrown the next day." What he actually did is just a little unclear. How much do you really trust Bernays, or what sort of doubts do you have about his own biography?

Larry Tye: That's a great question, and I would compare my answer to an answer that I give about Satchel Paige. I wrote a biography on this extraordinary pitcher, maybe the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball, Satchel Paige, only back when he was pitching, he was, it was in the era of Jim Crow segregation, racial segregation in America, and he was pitching for teams in what was known as the Negro Leagues. And there were no journalists or statisticians out there for every game to record the stats. And so Satchel gave us what he said was the likely statistic on everything from how many shutouts and no-hitters to how many games he played, and they seemed totally inconceivable. And I thought, " this guy is inventing things." But the closer I looked at his stats, while I'm convinced that he embellished a lot of his life stories, the closer I looked, I thought he actually may have understated because he pitched for so long, you know, a career that lasted 40 years, and he pitched probably in front of more people than anybody has ever played baseball in the history of the world.

And I came away with the same impression about Eddie Bernays. I knew he embellished. He left out things like his hidden hand with things like the Torches of Freedom Campaign. He left out what he knew about the health effects of smoking in those early days, and he gave himself a more central role in things than he might have deserved in lots of his campaigns. But on the other hand, when I started looking at other things Eddie Bernays said, we all know about the UPS, the United Parcel Service delivery trucks that are in our neighborhoods, and those trucks are painted brown.

Eddie Bernays told us that he was the one who had convinced UPS to paint those trucks brown because they were a neighbor, the color of trees and a friendly color, and it made just the UPS trucks feel more part of our neighborhood. And I went to the people at UPS and said, "Did Eddie Bernays do this? I can't believe that he's the one who did this." And they said, "He absolutely did it."

I went to the woman who was the key figure behind the Multiple Sclerosis Society, this horrible disease of multiple sclerosis, and I said, "Eddie Bernays is the one who said that multiple sclerosis was too much of a mouthful, and he said you want to call it MS. Did Eddie Bernays, couldn't have been the one who shortened it to MS?" And she said, "He absolutely was the one." So at the moment that I started doubting whether he could have done all he claimed he did, I found that he did more than I had thought that he had done and every bit of what he claimed on some things.

And that was the perfect way of seeding just the right amount of doubt. The doubt was no longer in my mind whether he did it. The doubt was he must have done it because he did all these other things. And Eddie Bernays knew that if we knew that he had done big things in some arenas, we would start believing that he had done all the big things he had claimed in every arena, and that wasn't true.

Andrew Mitrak: His fingerprints really are everywhere, from UPS to MS and a whole bunch of other places.

Spin in Politics and Media: Bernays' Influence Today

Well, I want to talk about Bernays' relevance today. At the time you published this book, you cited that there were 125,000 PR professionals, and I checked LinkedIn before this interview, and if I looked at public people with public relations or media relations titles, it's close to 400,000 people, and that grows to well into the millions if you include people with more broad but related titles like communications or social media. And it seems like Bernays is more relevant than ever. And I guess my question for you is, why don't you think he's better known? Is it time for a movie or a miniseries to be made or an updated version of your book or anything that could get this story out there even more?

Larry Tye: Eddie Bernays, while he was very much tuned in with whatever the cutting-edge forms of communication were, in this era of social media and when we have all the kinds of marketing and sales approaches via social media, Eddie Bernays would be dazzled and delighted. And I think while I wouldn't be self-serving enough to say that people ought to go out and buy my book, I think that what they ought to do is Eddie Bernays left behind a cache of papers that nobody in the field had ever dreamed of leaving behind because people didn't want us to see their fingerprints all over the campaigns that they had orchestrated. And he left behind these papers in a way that we can unspin not just Eddie Bernays' life but the way the profession works by looking at him.

Whether or not he was the father, he was the most dazzling figure in the history of public relations, and he lets us see its influence. And I think the only way we're going to unspin our world, and the only way that you as a young father can go to the store and be sure that you're getting products not because somebody has some insidious way convinced you you ought to be buying these but because these are the products that make sense, is by unspinning our world of PR and of influencers. And one way to do that is to go back to the beginning and use Eddie Bernays' career as a way of doing that.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, I know you said you weren't self-serving enough to promote your book, but I'll do it for you. It is a really delightful read. I think anybody working in public relations or marketing, or just wants to be aware of the media and some of the influences behind it, or just wants a good story. I read through it and just completely enjoyed it.

And you were speaking to some of the spin we see today, and one of my last questions for you as we wrap up is, are there any specific examples of publicity campaigns or media spin that you've seen recently or within the last few years that feel especially Bernaysian to you?

Larry Tye: Yes, so we're having this conversation just weeks after the last presidential election, and I saw both sides trying to spin the heck out of us in that campaign. And the scary thing to me is not that PR people and the spinmeisters that the campaigns hired were doing that, but when the conventional media starts doing that and starts, it used to be that we could turn on a Walter Cronkite and know that that was an objective look at the news. And now, whatever channel we turn on is giving us a particular angle on it. And I'm not sure who's going to do the unspinning today, but we used to depend on journalists to do that, and they're not as dependable as they were, or when they are dependable, we don't trust them and assume that they're undependable.

Andrew Mitrak: One of Bernays' quotes, I might get this slightly off, but it's in the book, is that “the best way to fight propaganda is more propaganda” which feels very self-serving for a propagandist to say, and I hope there's a solution other than that.

Larry Tye: I think that the “propaganda,” to him, was not a dirty word. More of the kind of propaganda or the kind of half-truths is not the way we get to the truth. We get to the truth by having something called the truth that we can trust rather than propaganda.

Andrew Mitrak: On a lighter note, one of the things that came to my mind of something that seems Bernaysian is this idea of superfoods, that I find myself eating foods like kale or quinoa, and I'm like, "Superfoods, that feels like a Bernaysian spin." And I looked this up, and it wasn't Bernays, but it did originate from the United Fruit Company.

Larry Tye: That’s wonderful.

Andrew Mitrak: It's a small world. These folks, they planted these seeds that are still having these impacts on us today. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time, Larry. This is such a delightful interview. What's the best way for listeners to learn more about you and support your work?

Larry Tye: So the easy way is to go to larrytye.com. My website has the nine books I've done, the tenth that I'm working on. And Andrew, it was a blast being on with you today. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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Larry Tye on Edward Bernays: "The Father of Public Relations"
6 feb· A History of Marketing
A History of Marketing / Episode 5
This week, my guest is author Larry Tye, who is best known for his biographies of iconic figures of American history. Tye's book "The Father of Spin" is the definitive biography of Edward L. Bernays, who is often called "The Father of Public Relations."
This excerpt from The Father of Spin provides a glimpse at the historic life of Bernays:
”Edward Bernays almost single-handedly fashioned the craft that has come to be called public relations. Bernays was the man who, more than any other, got women to smoke cigarettes, put bacon and eggs on the breakfast table, Ivory in soap dishes, books in bookshelves, and Calvin Coolidge back in the White House. Although most Americans have never heard of Edward Bernays, he nevertheless had a profound impact on everything from the products they purchased to the places they visited and the foods they ate for breakfast.”
Larry Tye is a New York Times best-selling author who penned biographies of Bobby Kennedy, Joe McCarthy, Satchel Paige, and Superman. His latest book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America, was published in 2024 to great reviews.
Larry joined me for a deep dive into his book, The Father of Spin, which is an excellent biography of Edward Bernays.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
In this conversation, we explore the amazing life of Bernays, including:
* Eddie’s close relationship with his uncle, Sigmund Freud and how psychoanalysis influenced his PR campaigns
* Marketing cigarettes to women under the guise of a feminist movement
* His propaganda campaign against the government of Guatemala on behalf of his client, the United Fruit Company, leading to a military coup backed by the CIA
* And much more!
Read the interview transcript, enhanced with links, images, and videos:
Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.
Introduction to Edward L. Bernays
Andrew Mitrak: Larry, thank you so much for joining us.
Larry Tye: Great to be with you, Andrew.
Andrew Mitrak: Today, we're going to travel back in time to your first book, The Father of Spin, which you published in 1998. It's the definitive biography of Edward L. Bernays, a truly fascinating man who's often called the father of public relations. I knew a little bit about the story of Bernays prior to reading your book and prior to doing this podcast. He's one of the reasons why I actually wanted to start this because this is a story that is not very well known today. So, how would you describe Bernays to someone who's never heard of him before?
Larry Tye: He was a guy who took his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas on why people behave the way they do and used it to try to transform that behavior on behalf of clients who ranged from American Presidents to the biggest corporations in the world to foreign leaders. He was somebody who developed all the skills of the art and the science of public relations in a way that reflected the best and the worst of that profession.
Andrew Mitrak: That's right. You really packed a lot in there. So we'll, of course, talk about his uncle Sigmund Freud and some of the best and the worst of his career as well. And so for you personally, prior to writing this book, you were a reporter working for the Boston Globe, and this was your first full-length book. Why Bernays? Of all the things you could have chosen to spend, I'm sure, years on to write your first book, why did you choose Eddie Bernays?
Larry Tye: So, I could give you the high-minded answer, which was that as a journalist, I was always fascinated by public relations. At times in my life as a journalist, I would depend on PR people on a deadline to get me to the right sources and to get my story completed, and at times I spent running away from PR people. So I was trying to understand the two ends of that profession. That would be the high-minded answer.
The truthful answer is that I was doing this incredible year-long fellowship called the Nieman, which is where 12 American and 12 overseas journalists are invited to spend a year at Harvard doing essentially anything they want. And at the end of that year, we were all in panic mode. And the panic was because we had been told for a year that we were Cinderella, and we were about to be going back to work and becoming char ladies again. And so we all wanted to try to figure out a way of making that magical year go on.
I was at one of the things that we learned to do pretty well during that Nieman year, which was go to cocktail parties. And I was at a cocktail party at my creative writing teacher's home. And the creative writing teacher was a woman named Anne Bernays, and her husband was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer named Justin Kaplan. A couple beers into that evening, I heard Justin say if his father-in-law wasn't his father-in-law, he would be writing his biography. And I wanted to know something about who his father-in-law was. And the next morning, I was at the doorstep of 102-year-old Edward Bernays.
He was taking me on a tour of his house, and I was contemplating the notion of being his biographer, only partly because I thought he was a fascinating character, but more because I thought writing a book would be a way of my getting to take another special year off doing what I wanted to do. And about three months after that visit to Edward Bernays, I had signed up a book agent, and my book agent was in the process of signing up a publisher, and I was on my way to getting another year off.
Meeting 102-year-old Edward Bernays
Andrew Mitrak: Well, let's jump to this about your encounter with Bernays. As I was researching Edward Bernays and in your book, I was looking at YouTube videos of him, which are amazing. They're preserved, recorded in the late '80s, so not quite at 102 years old, but pretty close. And you can even watch him on the David Letterman show, which is just wild. It feels like an anachronism. Eddie Bernays started his career before World War I. He worked with Thomas Edison and Calvin Coolidge, and here he is with David Letterman, a TV personality that I know and enjoy today. You met Edward Bernays at the end of his life. What was that like? What were your takeaways of him? What impression did he leave on you?
Larry Tye: There are two things I was struck by. One was how we went into his study, what his grandchildren called his ego room, and he showed me pictures of him, as you say, with Thomas Alva Edison, with Henry Ford, with President Calvin Coolidge. It was Eddie Bernays and everybody famous that he had known and worked for and helped influence. And I thought that was unusual. I thought that PR people were supposed to stay in the background, and the idea that the pictures were all with Eddie Bernays in them suggested the unusual kind of PR guy that he was, who was somebody who believed, and maybe rightfully believed, that his story was as important as these titans of industry and American Presidents.
The other thing that struck me about him was that age 102, knowing that his potential biographer was coming to visit him, he had put on his best suit and his tie and was looking absolutely perfect, except when I looked down at his feet, and he hadn't quite at age 102 been able to pull it all together, and he had two different color socks on. And I thought that was a reflection of the fact that he was showing a little bit of vulnerability to the fact that he was that old, but that he also had been waiting his entire life, had been waiting 102 years essentially, for somebody to come along and tell his story, and he wanted to make sure that he got it right, or that I got it right, and that I saw all the things that made him special. And he told me amazing stories, but I realized partway through the interview that it was like I was clicking button number three, and that was Eddie Bernays and Thomas Edison. He had told these stories so many times that it dawned on me that I was getting a partly rote version of the story, and I tried my hardest during that time with him to get him off message and relaxing a bit and telling a story in a way that seemed original rather than version number 75 of the same story.
Andrew Mitrak: I suppose that speaks both to his discipline as a PR person, sticking to the same story, but also his habit of being a self-promoter, of having spent, you know, decades telling these stories and using these to promote himself.
The "Professional Nephew": How Bernays Applied Freud's Theories to Public Relations
Andrew Mitrak: You already brought up his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and I think that's probably a good place to start as we get into his biography. You write, and I quote,
"Bernays had strong familial ties to the venerated psychologist. His mother was Freud's sister, and his father's sister was Freud's wife."
And I had to reread this a few times to make sure that there was nothing incestuous going on here, but it is totally fine. It's thinking of him as being sort of Freud's nephew in two different ways. Can you share more about his relationship with Freud?
Larry Tye: He was, as you point out, a double nephew, either through his mother or through his father, whichever he was choosing to point to. He had an especially close relationship to Sigmund Freud, and when he was a kid, he loved going to Vienna and doing long walks in the mountains with Uncle Siggy, as he called him. But it was a special relationship in a number of ways. One was that Sigmund Freud was partly in Eddie Bernays' debt, that when the Nazis were closing in on Sigmund Freud in the era of Adolf Hitler, it was Eddie Bernays who got his works translated into English and earned enough money through that translation from the publisher that he could help Freud escape the Germans' closing vice and make his way to England.
But Bernays also shocked his uncle. His uncle was a very buttoned-down, Viennese, old-world character, and Eddie Bernays wanted to translate Freud's ideas, his complicated ideas on psychotherapy, into little ditties that he could sell to American men and women in a way that would make him a mass-marketed commodity, and Freud was shocked by that. So he was grateful, he was shocked. It was a classic reaction to Eddie Bernays. It was a reaction to the good and the bad of who Eddie Bernays was, and in the end, what mattered was Bernays helped Freud stay alive, and everybody appreciated that.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, one of the things you write is that Bernays dropped Sigmund Freud's name so much that Variety dubbed him a "professional nephew" and that Eddie borrowed his uncle's insights into symbols and other forces that motivate people, using them as building blocks for the art and science of public relations. So what were some of the top lessons from psychology that Bernays brought to his work?
Larry Tye: Bernays was essentially a professional nephew. In the first five minutes that you met him, he would manage to drop Sigmund Freud's name and lots of other names. He really did study more than anybody had ever done the psychology of people's behaviors in a way of trying to understand how to shift them. Let me give you a concrete example.
Torches of Freedom: How Bernays Got Women to Smoke Cigarettes by Exploiting Feminism
Larry Tye: When he, in one of his most famous campaigns, he was representing the biggest manufacturer of cigarettes in America, the American Tobacco Company. And American Tobacco had done a great job through its publicity of addicting a generation of American men to smoking cigarettes, but there was the other half of the American population, women, and it was considered a social taboo. It was unladylike for women to pick up a cigarette. And Eddie Bernays wanted to change that.
So he went to a disciple of Uncle Sigmund's, a guy named Dr. A.A. Brill, and he said, "What do cigarettes represent to women in America?" And Brill talked about this taboo, the idea that that women weren't considered elegant and ladylike if they picked up a cigarette. So Eddie Bernays set off to change that, and he did that by orchestrating a march down Fifth Avenue, America's premier boulevard, on Easter Sunday, a holiday that represented religious freedom.
And he had these very elegant debutantes pull out cigarettes as they were marching, and he had ensured that photographers would be there waiting, knowing something magnificent was about to happen. And so in newspapers all across the world the day after Easter Sunday, there were pictures of these elegant women elegantly lighting up their cigarettes. And he wanted in one quick, staged event to transform the image of what cigarettes were. Instead of being something that was unladylike, he wanted it to be the symbol of elegance, and it worked. It worked enough that women slowly started coming around and buying American Tobacco products, and especially their number one selling cigarette, Lucky Strike. And lighting up cigarettes became, instead of a taboo for women, it became a sign of liberation. And there was actually a whole brand of cigarettes, Virginia Slims, that developed this theme of women being liberated by lighting up their slim cigarettes and looking elegant the way Bernays wanted them to.
“Big Think” & Horizontal Thinking: Bernays' Indirect Approach to Public Relations
Andrew Mitrak: This is a really great example of what you call the "big think" and the indirect approach that Bernays takes, and that he's hitching private interests to public ones. Instead of at the start just saying these cigarettes taste great or they're relaxing and they look good for women, he starts with a more indirect approach of tying it to women's liberation and women's rights, and it's a torch of freedom. Can you speak to this strategy of “big think” and this indirect approach that Bernays took to his work?
Larry Tye: So you're exactly right, first of all, about cigarettes, and it became known as the Torches of Freedom Campaign. But there was another element to it that also became classic Eddie Bernays, which is nobody was supposed to know that those women were recruited by Bernays, that it was supposed to be seen as an ad hoc, an ad-libbed, a spontaneous lighting up of cigarettes, and instead, it was all concocted by Eddie Bernays. He was a hidden hand, and he wanted to keep his hands hidden in this case.
But it was an approach that I call horizontal thinking. Let's take another example. When he went to work for the biggest book publishers in America, it was everybody from Random House to Simon & Schuster, to all the big publishers. And Eddie Bernays said, "You have to get out of your conventional thinking of how to sell more books." Conventional thinking would have been you lower the price a bit, and you have a bunch of ads, and that's a way to get Americans to buy more books. And that was what I call vertical thinking. One step leads logically to the next. Horizontal thinking, of the way that Eddie Bernays looked at a campaign like that, was to get people to re-envision the product itself.
And so what he did was he went to the leading home builders and designers in America with a very simple question. He said, "Are books important to American civilization?" Now, I'm not sure what American civilization even means, but the idea of books being important to something as high-minded as civilization was a no-brainer, and all these architects and home builders said, "Of course, books are important to American civilization." And Eddie Bernays took the results of his survey and went around to builders and designers who hadn't been part of his survey and said, "You can strike a blow for American civilization if the next home that you build or apartment that you design, you include built-in bookshelves."
It was something that hadn't been standard in any homes, and now we know that homes of a certain era all included built-in bookshelves, and that became part of what was in people's homes. And you're not going to fill a bookshelf with cereal boxes or with cigarettes. You're going to put books into a bookshelf.
Bernays figured if he could have books as part of the decoration, as part of the fabric of houses, you were going to sell more books because people wanted to buy the books to put in the bookshelves to show the world how literate they were. And when you go to people's homes, one of the standard things that I do when I go into somebody's home is I look at the books that are in their living room bookshelf, and I'm intrigued by what they're reading, and Eddie Bernays understood that that would happen.
And it worked brilliantly for publishers. Suddenly, they were not just selling books with the conventional and the old-hat method of putting them on a discount because that discount at some point would have to go away, or they wouldn't make money, that it became part of American homes to sell more books. And that was horizontal thinking, and it was big-think thinking, and it was Eddie Bernays' thinking that transformed the profession of public relations. He called himself the father, but if father means the first, he wasn't the first, but he was the most artful and the most scientific and the most successful.
Andrew Mitrak: I have a home that was built back then, and I have built-in bookshelves. So I wonder, “Was that some of Eddie's influence there?”
Larry Tye: So you have bookshelves, and what do you have in your bookshelves?
Andrew Mitrak: Well, at a time, I had books. But now I have toddlers, so now it's a random collection of some of their toys and things that we have. We've kind of given up on having a nice, presentable home. But yes – before kids, it was books.
For Better and For Worse: Addressing the Morality Behind Bernays PR Campaigns
Andrew Mitrak: Comparing, contrasting this versus the Torches of Freedom example – there was sort of using his powers for good – reading – and bad – cigarettes. These are just so illustrative of how he's using some of the same techniques for his clients regardless of the morality behind it.
Larry Tye: That is true. Eddie Bernays was value-neutral, the same way public relations as a profession is. It can be used to promote the best causes in the world or the most insidious causes in the world. And one of the things that happened as a result of his campaign to addict women to the same vice that men had been addicted to, of cigarettes, what happened was that women's lung cancer rates caught up to men's rates. And he knew the health risk in a way that very few people in America did back then. He had access to the biggest cigarette company in America and to all of their health studies. And at home, he was telling his daughters to take their mother's cigarettes and break them, as he said, "like brittle bones," and flush them down the toilet. And he was doing that at the same time he was trying to sell this bad habit to women all across the world.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, this is where it's hard to overlook Bernays' cynicism or maybe hypocrisy. So he knew as early as 1930 that what he was promoting as a form of women's liberation had this horrible health effect. Did Bernays in his life ever acknowledge this hypocrisy?
Larry Tye: He said later in life that he hadn't known. If he had known how dangerous cigarettes were to women and men, he would never have promoted them. But we now know, because of the papers that Eddie Bernays left behind, his own papers, that he absolutely knew about the health risks. And what he tried to do as a mea culpa later in life is this guy who had represented American Tobacco Company was suddenly representing the American Lung Association in trying to wean people off the very habit that he had created for them. And so the good news is that he did good in later life in trying to end the addiction. The bad news is that he created it in the first place, and he later lied about it.
The All-American Breakfast: How Bernays Made Bacon and Eggs a Staple
Andrew Mitrak: Before we kind of get to some of his later-in-life work, there are so many other examples of his indirect approach and some of his other greatest hits. One of the things you write is that when he was, quote,
"Hired to sell a product or service, he instead sold new ways of behaving, which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of American life."
And we've talked about bookshelves as texture, of course, smoking, kind of bad texture. Are there some of the other examples of his applications of this that come to mind?
Larry Tye: One of my favorites is when he went to work for the Beech-Nut Packing Company, and that was the big bacon maker. And he wanted to change the way people thought not just about bacon but about eating. And so what he did was he again took his technique of going out with a very simple question to a lot of eminent people. And the simple question was, "Is a hearty breakfast a good thing for people to eat?" Now, who knew what a hearty breakfast meant? But the very word "hearty" suggests that it's healthy, it's a robust meal to start your day. And he went out to leading health authorities, and he asked them, "Do you endorse a hearty breakfast?" And they all said yes. And he took that back and said, "A hearty breakfast is a bacon and eggs breakfast." And he gave the definition to what "hearty" was, which was a definition he had never told the doctors who he was surveying.
And the ultimate, as we know now, artery-clogging breakfast of a bacon and eggs breakfast had not been an all-American breakfast. In fact, much of America was dashing off to work, even in those days in the '30s and '40s and '50s, dashing off to work, downing a cup of coffee and maybe a slice of bread and a glass of orange juice if they had a little bit of extra time.
But Eddie Bernays said, "No, we want to have an all-American breakfast, the ultimate hearty breakfast." And now we know when you go into, when you're with your kids and you're taking them out for breakfast, everybody goes in and orders at their favorite diner or wherever their breakfast joint is, a bacon and eggs breakfast when they have time to do it. And we don't look at the fact that it's unhealthy.
We look at the fact that that somehow has a certain symbolism. It's a warmth, it's comfort food. Instead of again taking the conventional, the vertical approach of just trying to have publicity around people buying bacon, he changed the whole way we looked at what bacon was all about. And it was not just Beech-Nut, but all the bacon makers were selling more bacon because that was part of what Americans were eating more of for their all-American breakfast.
Andrew Mitrak: So instead of saying Beech-Nut bacon is the best, he never even attached his client's name to the promotion. It was more about growing the entire category or inventing this new category of a hearty breakfast, which, by the way, my client defines or meets the definition in the way that I define it, and that leads to their success.
Larry Tye: Yes, exactly that.
Marketing to Children: The Ivory Soap Campaign
Andrew Mitrak: We've talked about bookshelves, bacon. There's another B for Bernays, which is bath soap, which I thought was also a really clever use for that. Could you tell a story of how he managed to market and change opinions about bath soap?
Larry Tye: He was working for Procter & Gamble, which made the number one selling soap in the country. I don't know if it is anymore, but it was then, and it was Ivory Soap. And he decided that he looked at the behavior of American women, who were the ultimate shoppers back then, and he said, "How do they decide what soap to buy?" And one way was they took their kids often to the grocery store with them, and if kids picked out a particular kind of soap, that was the soap that they bought. He started thinking, "What is the way that I can get kids, who never think about the brand of product they're buying, how can I get them interested in something as prosaic as the kind of soap that their mothers buy?"
And he created this series of contests that became this thing, it was the ultimate fad in America, where there was a soap carving contest, and kids could win prizes, and it was sponsored by the biggest manufacturer in the country of household products, Procter & Gamble. And kids were rewarded with prizes that became a big thing in their school and in their after-school programs if they could carve Ivory Soap into the best-looking sculptures. And he didn't care about kids carving soap. He cared about kids wanting Ivory Soap because that was the soap that became the standard of eligibility for that contest. And suddenly, kids were going to the grocery store with their moms and saying, "We want Ivory Soap because that's what we can carve into something that can win us a prize." And Eddie Bernays again realized it wasn't just going to the women who were paying for the soap. It was going to the kids. If a mother saw that their kid wanted a particular kind of soap and might stay clean because of that, they were willing to buy any soap that the kid suggested, and the kid suggested Ivory.
Andrew Mitrak: At first, I thought this was an example of one of the more positive impacts of Bernays' work. You know, what's better than using soap? But as you mentioned that, I thought about it, and maybe this introduced an idea of marketing to children, which opens its own set of moral quandaries. And now we see toys that families don't need or high-sugar breakfast cereals being marketed towards kids, and them asking their parents for that. So maybe he has his fingerprints on that as well.
Larry Tye: He does. He has his fingerprints on just about everything that we are sold, on whether it is good or bad.
Behind the Scenes and in the Spotlight: Bernays' Passion for Self-Promotion
Andrew Mitrak: One of the many things that makes Bernays unique is that while most publicity people worked behind the scenes, he actively boosted his reputation. He wrote, quote, "In an era of mass communication, modesty is a private virtue and a public fault," end quote. And he wrote books around this. He wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion. He wrote a book called Propaganda. And while most people in his field were called press agents or publicity men. It sounds like he coined the term "public relations" and gave himself this title of "public relations counselor." So how did Eddie's peers or others in the industry or even his clients react to his habit of injecting himself into the story and being such a self-promoter?
Larry Tye: They thought he was shameless, and he was shameless. He actually wrote a book called Biography of an Idea, and what that was, it was probably the worst-selling book in the history of publishing. It was an entire book devoted to everywhere that Eddie Bernays had been quoted. He wanted to make sure that the world didn't miss a single smart thing or unsmart thing that he had ever said. So parts of the book were just about him being quoted in newspapers and in books and in magazines. And what he was really writing it for was an audience of one, and the one was the person that had ended up being me, as the first case who was going to write his biography. So he didn't want to trust that I was going to realize all the brilliant things he had said. He wanted to make sure that they were there and handed to me on this platter.
And the way his fellow practitioners back then, and there weren't many of them back then, and the way practitioners today look at him is, on the one hand, he's the most studied PR guy in courses on PR or marketing or advertising. And on the other hand, he's the one that everybody has a smile on their face when they talk about because they all realize that he is the one who convinced us that he was the father of public relations. Anytime you saw him quoted, including in his New York Times full-page obituary, he was referred to as the father. But as we were discussing, if father means first, there were people, including the famous Ivy Lee, who was hired by J.D. Rockefeller, there were people who came before him. But nobody wrote as much about the profession. Nobody mixed as artfully as Bernays did the art and the science of the profession. And nobody ensured that their name was out there in as many public forums as Eddie Bernays did.
And it was exactly the kind of thing. One of my best guides when I was writing the book was a man named Harold Burson, and he was one of the named people on what was at the time the biggest PR firm in the world, called Burson-Marsteller. And Harold Burson thought that Eddie Bernays was brilliant, but he thought that he was doing exactly the wrong thing. Burson believed, like most PR people, that their hand, they were being well-paid to be in the background, and it was the clients who wanted to be on center stage. And Eddie Bernays thought that he could have it both ways. He could be there alongside his client, and he could be seen as a genius. And Eddie Bernays also did something that public relations people are grateful to him for, which was he said, "The only way that you will get people like the President or like the heads of big companies to take us seriously is if we charge a fee that is equal to the salary that they're making." And so he ensured that PR people, nobody knew what they should be paying them, and he ensured that they made fat paychecks.
Doris Fleischman’s Role in the Bernays PR Empire
Andrew Mitrak: I'm sure his peers and colleagues appreciated that. One of the people, as he was self-promoting, somebody who he overlooked was his wife, Doris Fleischman, who sounds like she was really a big contributor behind the scenes to his work and was really a remarkable figure in her own right. Can you share who Doris was and what her role was in building the Bernays public relations empire?
Larry Tye: Her role was absolutely essential. The more eloquent that something that Bernays said was, the more likely it had been coined by Doris because she was at least as smart as he was. She was more articulate than he was, and she was more realistic on what could actually work. But it was partly the era, and that was an era where women weren't as involved in the professional world, and there was incredible gender bias back then.
And so Eddie Bernays did a whole lot to promote Doris's ideas but not to promote Doris. And we see when she left her papers to a library at Harvard University, we can see her genius, and there's been a wonderful biography written about Doris. And her daughters, their daughters were big on telling me just the very important role that Doris played, and they were always upset that their father never gave her the credit that she deserved.
But when they were married, he booked a room at the Waldorf-Astoria, this elegant old hotel in New York, and he promised her that he would be low-key about the wedding, and they were married at City Hall. But when they signed in on their wedding night at the Waldorf, he knew, because he had worked for the Waldorf, that if he had an unusual way of signing in, that this could become a news event. And the unusual way was signing in with his name and with her maiden name, and nobody did that in those days. Women changed their name, and she kept her name of Doris Fleischman. And having created that policy for the Waldorf, he knew that it would become a headline in the next day's papers, that a man and woman signed in with their names before they were married as their names after they were married, and their wedding became big news.
Andrew Mitrak: He never misses an opportunity. One of the other amazing facts about Doris, or just a really quirky fact, is that she was the first woman issued an American passport who was married but had her maiden name on it, which seems like just a family full of firsts and milestones there.
United Fruit Company vs. the Government of Guatemala: the Ultimate Public Relations Coup
Andrew Mitrak: The final story we'll cover of Bernays' career is maybe even a wilder and potentially darker story than his work with American Tobacco, and it's all about bananas. Could you just share what this story in this chapter of Bernays' career is about?
Larry Tye: This goes back to an era in American foreign policy where there were things that we knew, we referred to in that time as banana republics, and they were called banana republics, they were in Latin America, and they were called banana republics because the big fruit companies, like United Fruit that Eddie Bernays worked for, actually seemed to almost own these countries. They owned a huge chunk of the land. They were the biggest employer, and they could dictate the policy, the domestic and foreign policy of many of these countries. But something happened in one of these banana republics in Guatemala in the 1950s, and that is they elected a leftist as their leader. And United Fruit Company worried that he would expropriate their lands, and so they hired, they brought in their PR guy, Eddie Bernays, to try to do something about it.
And Eddie Bernays, who showed that he could affect people's behavior and what they bought, also showed through this campaign that he could elect, he could affect the behavior of America's foreign policy. He put out all kinds of propaganda suggesting this was a threat to American values by having this leftist government there. He encouraged the American government to go in quietly and try to undermine, in a way that nobody would know was the American government doing this, this leftist government.
And it was essentially testing out a policy that we would use later in Cuba when we went in and staged the Bay of Pigs invasion and tried to depose Fidel Castro, only in this case, it worked, and the leftist leader was tossed out of office in a totally undemocratic way. He had been elected democratically, and the free will of the people of Guatemala was undermined by Eddie Bernays, by the United Fruit Company, and by the Eisenhower administration. And it showed that there were no limits. Borders were no limit to what Eddie Bernays could do on behalf of whatever client he happened to represent. And in this case, it was fruit companies who exerted the kind of power that we disparaged by inventing this term "banana republics," but was actually what happened in these countries, not just in Latin America, but all across the world.
Andrew Mitrak: We have limited time together, but we could spend probably hours just talking about this story alone with United Fruit Company, which is, of course, now known as Chiquita Banana, and Samuel Zemurray, who's known as Sam the Banana Man, and this fascinating array of characters.
Bernays: The Unreliable Narrator and Verifying the Facts
As we wrap up on some of our look back on Bernays' work and his contributions to public relations, I kind of want to talk about Bernays as the unreliable narrator. Your book is The Father of Spin, and of course, he stretched the truth about his, for his clients, but he also embellished his own story. And in your book, you often tell the story from Bernays' perspective, but then you find accounts from others that typically cast some reasons to doubt some of the more self-aggrandizing claims. And we're sort of led to think that the truth is a little blurry. It's maybe directionally right, but in Bernays' case, a little less, "Hey, we did this parade, and suddenly women start smoking," or, "I do a propaganda campaign, and soon a democratically elected government in Guatemala is overthrown the next day." What he actually did is just a little unclear. How much do you really trust Bernays, or what sort of doubts do you have about his own biography?
Larry Tye: That's a great question, and I would compare my answer to an answer that I give about Satchel Paige. I wrote a biography on this extraordinary pitcher, maybe the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball, Satchel Paige, only back when he was pitching, he was, it was in the era of Jim Crow segregation, racial segregation in America, and he was pitching for teams in what was known as the Negro Leagues. And there were no journalists or statisticians out there for every game to record the stats. And so Satchel gave us what he said was the likely statistic on everything from how many shutouts and no-hitters to how many games he played, and they seemed totally inconceivable. And I thought, " this guy is inventing things." But the closer I looked at his stats, while I'm convinced that he embellished a lot of his life stories, the closer I looked, I thought he actually may have understated because he pitched for so long, you know, a career that lasted 40 years, and he pitched probably in front of more people than anybody has ever played baseball in the history of the world.
And I came away with the same impression about Eddie Bernays. I knew he embellished. He left out things like his hidden hand with things like the Torches of Freedom Campaign. He left out what he knew about the health effects of smoking in those early days, and he gave himself a more central role in things than he might have deserved in lots of his campaigns. But on the other hand, when I started looking at other things Eddie Bernays said, we all know about the UPS, the United Parcel Service delivery trucks that are in our neighborhoods, and those trucks are painted brown.
Eddie Bernays told us that he was the one who had convinced UPS to paint those trucks brown because they were a neighbor, the color of trees and a friendly color, and it made just the UPS trucks feel more part of our neighborhood. And I went to the people at UPS and said, "Did Eddie Bernays do this? I can't believe that he's the one who did this." And they said, "He absolutely did it."
I went to the woman who was the key figure behind the Multiple Sclerosis Society, this horrible disease of multiple sclerosis, and I said, "Eddie Bernays is the one who said that multiple sclerosis was too much of a mouthful, and he said you want to call it MS. Did Eddie Bernays, couldn't have been the one who shortened it to MS?" And she said, "He absolutely was the one." So at the moment that I started doubting whether he could have done all he claimed he did, I found that he did more than I had thought that he had done and every bit of what he claimed on some things.
And that was the perfect way of seeding just the right amount of doubt. The doubt was no longer in my mind whether he did it. The doubt was he must have done it because he did all these other things. And Eddie Bernays knew that if we knew that he had done big things in some arenas, we would start believing that he had done all the big things he had claimed in every arena, and that wasn't true.
Andrew Mitrak: His fingerprints really are everywhere, from UPS to MS and a whole bunch of other places.
Spin in Politics and Media: Bernays' Influence Today
Well, I want to talk about Bernays' relevance today. At the time you published this book, you cited that there were 125,000 PR professionals, and I checked LinkedIn before this interview, and if I looked at public people with public relations or media relations titles, it's close to 400,000 people, and that grows to well into the millions if you include people with more broad but related titles like communications or social media. And it seems like Bernays is more relevant than ever. And I guess my question for you is, why don't you think he's better known? Is it time for a movie or a miniseries to be made or an updated version of your book or anything that could get this story out there even more?
Larry Tye: Eddie Bernays, while he was very much tuned in with whatever the cutting-edge forms of communication were, in this era of social media and when we have all the kinds of marketing and sales approaches via social media, Eddie Bernays would be dazzled and delighted. And I think while I wouldn't be self-serving enough to say that people ought to go out and buy my book, I think that what they ought to do is Eddie Bernays left behind a cache of papers that nobody in the field had ever dreamed of leaving behind because people didn't want us to see their fingerprints all over the campaigns that they had orchestrated. And he left behind these papers in a way that we can unspin not just Eddie Bernays' life but the way the profession works by looking at him.
Whether or not he was the father, he was the most dazzling figure in the history of public relations, and he lets us see its influence. And I think the only way we're going to unspin our world, and the only way that you as a young father can go to the store and be sure that you're getting products not because somebody has some insidious way convinced you you ought to be buying these but because these are the products that make sense, is by unspinning our world of PR and of influencers. And one way to do that is to go back to the beginning and use Eddie Bernays' career as a way of doing that.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, I know you said you weren't self-serving enough to promote your book, but I'll do it for you. It is a really delightful read. I think anybody working in public relations or marketing, or just wants to be aware of the media and some of the influences behind it, or just wants a good story. I read through it and just completely enjoyed it.
And you were speaking to some of the spin we see today, and one of my last questions for you as we wrap up is, are there any specific examples of publicity campaigns or media spin that you've seen recently or within the last few years that feel especially Bernaysian to you?
Larry Tye: Yes, so we're having this conversation just weeks after the last presidential election, and I saw both sides trying to spin the heck out of us in that campaign. And the scary thing to me is not that PR people and the spinmeisters that the campaigns hired were doing that, but when the conventional media starts doing that and starts, it used to be that we could turn on a Walter Cronkite and know that that was an objective look at the news. And now, whatever channel we turn on is giving us a particular angle on it. And I'm not sure who's going to do the unspinning today, but we used to depend on journalists to do that, and they're not as dependable as they were, or when they are dependable, we don't trust them and assume that they're undependable.
Andrew Mitrak: One of Bernays' quotes, I might get this slightly off, but it's in the book, is that “the best way to fight propaganda is more propaganda” which feels very self-serving for a propagandist to say, and I hope there's a solution other than that.
Larry Tye: I think that the “propaganda,” to him, was not a dirty word. More of the kind of propaganda or the kind of half-truths is not the way we get to the truth. We get to the truth by having something called the truth that we can trust rather than propaganda.
Andrew Mitrak: On a lighter note, one of the things that came to my mind of something that seems Bernaysian is this idea of superfoods, that I find myself eating foods like kale or quinoa, and I'm like, "Superfoods, that feels like a Bernaysian spin." And I looked this up, and it wasn't Bernays, but it did originate from the United Fruit Company.
Larry Tye: That’s wonderful.
Andrew Mitrak: It's a small world. These folks, they planted these seeds that are still having these impacts on us today. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time, Larry. This is such a delightful interview. What's the best way for listeners to learn more about you and support your work?
Larry Tye: So the easy way is to go to larrytye.com. My website has the nine books I've done, the tenth that I'm working on. And Andrew, it was a blast being on with you today. Thank you.

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David Aaker: "The Father of Modern Branding"
30 jan· A History of Marketing
A History of Marketing / Episode 4 This week, my guest is David Aaker, the "Father of Modern Branding," a renowned marketing professor, author, and consultant who has revolutionized the way we think about brands. Aaker's work on brand equity helped elevate the role of marketing to serve a more strategic function in organizations.
Aaker is the author of several seminal books, including "Managing Brand Equity" (1991) and "Building Strong Brands" (1996), which introduced the influential Aaker Model. He's also Vice Chairman of Prophet, a global brand consultancy, where he's advised some of the world's most recognizable brands.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
In this conversation, we explore the history of branding, from the early days of brand management at Procter & Gamble to the emergence of brand equity as a central concept in the late 1980s. Dr. Aaker shares his insights on the evolution of marketing, the challenges of building strong brands in today's world, and the enduring power of a strategic brand strategy. We also touch on the disappearance of taglines, the rise of the CMO, and even get some perspective from one of Dr. Aaker's former students, the marketing professor and commentator Scott Galloway.
Now, without further ado, here is my conversation with David Aaker.
David Aaker’s Early Research: From Quantitative Modeling to Brand Strategy
Andrew Mitrak: Well, I'm looking forward to having a conversation about the history and evolution of branding, but before we do that, I want to learn about your background. You earned your Masters in Statistics and you earned a PhD in Business Administration. So how did you go from there to a decades-long career in marketing?
David Aaker: Well, as an undergraduate, I had a course in advertising that was really fascinating to me, to try to understand, “How are you going to change opinions?” And that got me started on marketing. After I graduated from Stanford as a PhD student, I went to Berkeley and started as a kind of a quantitative modeler, a statistician, and then I drifted into advertising and market research and business strategy, and then finally into branding.
Andrew: When did branding become your area of focus professionally?
David: It happened in the late 1980s, actually. Now that's over 30 years ago. All the stars were aligned. For one thing, there was a strategy model, the growth-share matrix by BCG, that was dominating people's strategy, and they thought that they saw empirically that if you increase market share, you'll increase profitability. And they believed that because large market share companies made more money than small ones did. Well, it turns out that if you are a small company and you increase market share, you don't increase profitability. In fact, you make it go down because you've bought market share, you've hurt your brands, and so on. But managers also realized it because they could see the facts: they weren't growing, they weren't making money, and so they needed an alternative.
And at the same time, scanner data came into being. For the first time, you could give people a card, you know exactly what they bought the next day, and so you could go in and attach to their TV sets and manipulate what ads they were seeing, if they saw it once, twice, three times, four times, this kind of content or that kind of content. What they found was the only thing that affected sales was price-off promotions. So that's what everybody rushed to do, and as a result, they destroyed brands. And by the way, they did not increase share, they didn't increase sales, they didn't do anything. Well, what they did is taught the customer price is the most important, and if it's not on sale, wait two weeks. So they really destroyed brands.
And at the same time, I had reached a point where I was kind of all over the map. I was a quantitative researcher on advertising and effects on stock markets, and I had done work on experimental work on warmth and advertising. I had done work on social issues, and I'd written a book on advertising, market research, and business strategy. I'd gotten into business strategy, and when I was there, I got to believe that people weren't managing for the long term. They were so short-term oriented, the short-term financials were so dominant, and I thought that's not right. And I did a study that showed — I asked people, what are your sustainable competitive advantages? I got a list of 44, and number one on the list was perceived quality, number three on the list was brand awareness, and number 10 on the list was customer base. So three out of the top 10 were branding. And I had a background that I could draw on market research, advertising; they all helped me attack the issue, namely, what is brand equity and how do you build it? And so I kind of at that point decided to devote my career to that.
Neil McElroy and the P&G Brand Man
Andrew: I want to go back in history and to kind of plant the seeds of how we eventually got to these ideas of brand equity in the late 1980s, as you mentioned. I watched one of your lectures on YouTube. You were speaking to the Haas School at Berkeley, and you told a story of a pivotal moment that occurred in May of 1931, and this is when a Procter and Gamble employee named Neil McElroy wrote a memo. Could you share the story of who Neil McElroy was and what was so significant about his memo?
David: Marketing burst onto the scene with mass media in the 1920s, and so on. You had Lucky Strike, "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet." You know, it was sort of there, and so they needed to manage it. And Procter & Gamble — Neil McElroy was 28 years old, he was a junior manager, he managed Camay soap, and the big soap was Lifebuoy, but he managed Camay soap. And he said, "I would like to hire three" — we called them brand men — "brand men." And he wrote a three-page memo in response to pushback on why he should do that, and that three-page memo that he wrote one Friday in 1931 became the basis of the brand management model for Procter & Gamble. It was very tactical. What they did was they looked at data across grocery stores, and they found how each brand was doing in each store, and they identified areas in which there was weakness. And the brand job of the brand manager was to correct the weakness by adjusting price, by making the distribution more efficient, by doing some special promotions, maybe some in-store displays, but they would find a problem and address the problem.
Everybody that wanted to be in branding, in marketing, wanted to work at Procter & Gamble because then they would take that, and they'd move that system elsewhere. And that went on for really 50 years until brand equity took over in the late '80s. And that Neil McElroy went on to be a CEO of Procter & Gamble and later the Secretary of Defense. I mean, he was really a capable guy.
Andrew: That's amazing. And what's funny is you could actually visit Neil McElroy's Wikipedia page, and you can read the original memo. And of course, part of it's this innovative brand management strategy. Part of it, as you say, is really tactical. It's him asking for assistant brand men to kind of do the grunt work so the more senior brand men could do this. And it was just striking me that it almost reads like one of my end-of-year emails asking the boss for more resources or interns or something like that. It was just remarkable.
How Colley, Levy, and Kotler Shaped Marketing and Brand
David: Oh, I would mention three other things that really elevated branding, and they occurred around 1950 or 1960. In 1959, a guy named Russell HColley was writing for a think tank, and he wrote something called "Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results." It was an ANA publication, and what he did was to say, if you want to measure advertising, you need to measure the things that are driving sales, not just sales. You measure awareness, you measure image, you measure intentions. And so after that, people started doing tracking studies, market research where they did that. So that was really a step up for management of branding, indeed marketing.
And then two years later, a guy named Sid Levy, who was then a professor of marketing with Phil Kotler at Northwestern, and he wrote an article called "Symbols for Sale," and it was all about how a product can become a symbol of yourself. And that was really a step up, and it really introduced the whole concept of self-expressive benefits, which had been seen, but nobody had codified it.
And then about nine years later, he and Phil Kotler wrote a famous article called "Broadening the Concept of Marketing," and that meant that marketing is not just for packaged goods, marketing is for the US Army, it's for nonprofits, it's for cities, it's for states and countries. Now, all those kind of entities are really interested in branding today because they understand that their objectives really require communication, and it's hard to communicate without a brand that's working.
Andrew: I spoke with Phil about that. I think it was 1968 or '69 that was written.
The Evolution of Brand Management: From Tactical to Strategic
Andrew: If you went back, there was Procter & Gamble, early '30s, Neil McElroy introduced brand management at that company. Then Phil Kotler, 30 to 40 years later, expands the concepts of marketing. In between that phase, who owned branding at a company? Was branding usually owned by an internal brand manager at most companies? Was it an external marketing agency or advertising agency that managed it? How did most companies handle it at that time?
David: It was handled by the head of marketing or the marketing department, and they'd have some people that would be responsible for advertising, for promotions, for different elements of a Salesforce if it was a B2B company. So there was no entity called branding. Well, there still isn't. I mean, it's not real common. I mean, it's not universal, for sure, that they have somebody in charge of branding because it's so intermixed into marketing. In fact, branding is sort of intermixed with the whole business strategy or organizational strategy.
Andrew: Procter & Gamble, a consumer packaged goods company — was it primarily companies like that that had brand managers or brand men, as they were called back then, or did other companies and other industries adopt this Procter & Gamble model as well?
David: The packaged goods were the first, and that's because P&G were training all these people that were spreading out. But then came the durables, like the cars — the car companies — and appliances, and then came services, like banks and so on. And the slower ones were B2B companies who are, you know, the Salesforce, you know, "We don't need any help, thank you very much. We're going to, we're going to convince people to go our way." The last ones to come on were things like hospitals, and they kind of discovered branding and patient behavior and so on just a few decades ago. So it has been a progression through the system.
Andrew: When I look at some of the early academic teaching of marketing, its roots as applied economics, the marketing mix, the four P's. Branding isn't one of the words, or brand is maybe there but it was in the background. When did brand become a more prominent part?
Defining and Managing Brand Equity
David: The concept of brand equity really came on the scene in the late '80s. I wrote my first book trying to define brand equity, called "Managing Brand Equity," and that was really when brand equity became a thing.
The concept of brand is not, in my view, you can't take that too far. It's brand equity that is the more important construct. I don't really think about brands very much because it's kind of just a nominal product. Brand means that that represents who did it or who's responsible for the product. So if you brand cattle, then you know whose cattle that is. But I'm more interested in brand equity — that is, what's the value of a brand?
That, I concluded, was three things. It was not just brand awareness, but brand elements. So you have to be aware, you have to be credible, and if you could, you know, make a great hybrid car, it didn't matter if they were looking for electronic vehicles, EVs. And so you had to be credible in that space, you had to be relevant in that space, not just generally visible.
The second thing, you had to have a right image, which really involved not only functional benefits but emotional, self-expressive, and social benefits as well. And finally, you had to develop a loyal customer base.
When I developed this model of brand equity, it was different than anybody else at the time because for everybody else, brands was awareness and image, that was it. And so you got visible and you tried to create an interesting image — that was branding, and then that would cause brand loyalty to occur. But I said that brand loyalty was part of it, and that turned out to be really significant because when you put brand equity on the table as part of brand, that really changes everything. I mean, it changes, you know, who runs brands, it changes what you do, it gets you involved in strategy, not just tactics. Because image and awareness, you can delegate to an agency, but brand loyalty, you can't. It gets you involved in developing new offerings and so on. So that was really a key step.
Andrew: This gets you to your book, "Managing Brand Equity." I think it was published in 1991. How was it adopted by the industry? Was this book an immediate hit? Did it have — was it adopted by companies as well, or what was the impact of this book?
David: Well, the contribution of the book was really to elevate brand as an asset concept, that it's not a tactical thing you delegate to an agency, it's an asset, it's one of your assets, and you got to build the asset, you got to manage the asset, you have to protect the asset, you have to leverage the asset like any other asset. In fact, you can argue that business strategy is all about leveraging assets, that's what it is. So this becomes really an important asset, and that was a contribution of the book.
And it came out in two ways. One was, as I said, the structure of brand equity — relevance, image, and loyalty. But the other thing was, for each of those areas, I pointed out the six or seven ways that this contributes to an organization's success. So the net result was 20 or so bullet points that showed different ways that this works. You know, like, for example, if you gain visibility, you get credit for being successful or credit for being good enough to buy, because otherwise, why would you have heard of it? So if you multiply that insight by 20, you see that all this brand stuff really pays off. And so it helped people think through why a brand is worth doing.
Building Strong Brands
David: Then I got a lot of response to that book, and a lot of people said, "Okay, I buy into that. How do you build brands?" And so I wrote a book called "Building Strong Brands," and in that book, I developed a framework for how you do that. It was very juxtaposed against the advertising agency's point of view. They were always looking for the big idea, the three-word phrase and so on, because they'd build up a campaign around that. And so my idea was that, no, it's not a three-word phrase, it's multi-dimensional. It's — especially for B2B or service companies — that's eight or 10 or 12 dimensions, and three or four of these would be the most important. And you know how to figure out what those are and what they really mean and then how you advance it. So that was kind of my model. I also said that it involves things like personality, like organizational characteristics, not just offering characteristics. That turned out to be really pivotal. I'm not saying I replaced Procter & Gamble, but a lot of organizations around the world started using that model.
The Rise of the CMO: Marketing Enters the C-Suite
Andrew: So this late '80s, early '90s period — was this also around the time that CMOs started to emerge as an executive function and marketing got a seat at the table with executives? What was the emergence of this?
David: Yeah, this idea that brand is an asset and there's brand equity and you can build it changed everything. It changed what marketing did. Instead of being a tactical arm, it's now a strategic arm, it's part of strategy, and it brings to the strategy table a knowledge of the customer, a knowledge of the segmentation. And the second thing it did was to change who does marketing. Instead of being a middle management function, it's now at the C-suite, there's a CMO or Vice President of Marketing. That just changes everything. So and people begin to realize that, you know, brand loyalty is something we have to all worry about, and we have to figure out offerings that'll make it happen, we have to figure out how the customer journey is and so on. That makes everybody in the organization kind of part of the marketing team.
Andrew: As a professional marketer, I should thank you for that, because it's good to roll up to a CMO who has a seat at the table.
The Evolution of the Aaker Model
Andrew: You mentioned your book, "Building Strong Brands," and you introduced a brand identity model here. This later evolved into a brand vision model. Sometimes these are collectively known as the Aaker Model. Can you share about how you developed these brand frameworks and how they're different?
David: I think that the overriding motivator of me is that, you know, we're talking about a long-term asset that's going to be built and managed and leveraged, and it's not a three-word phrase. I was really obsessed with the idea that we didn't want a three-word phrase. The other thing I was — the other thing that a lot of people did that had brand models, they'd have a set of boxes, and they'd have six or eight boxes. And so if you, at the end, when you're developing your strategy for your brand, you have to fill in each box. There was a personality box, so you got to say what your personal — there was a benefit box, there was a, you know, organizational value box, there was all — there would be really six or 10 boxes, and it did not matter if that box was relevant to you, and it did not matter if there was some box they needed that wasn't there.
And so I was also obsessed with that. So the second principle of my approach was no boxes. You create the boxes that work for you at your time. You say, what I want to stand for, what are the six things I want to stand for? And you — there's no predetermined boxes, and you're not out of luck if you miss a box because you're going to create your own box. So those are the two premises of my model. It's multi-dimensional, it's not a three-word phrase, and the dimensions are not preset.
Andrew: I love this. It is such a pet peeve of mine, I guess, when somebody sends over some boxes to be filled out for something that's strategic and a little more personalized. And it seems so reductionist to just say, "Hey, my job is to check some box here about, oh, here's the tagline and here's this segmentation." I mean, useful to some degree, probably better than nothing, but also just so constraining for something —
Branding and Disruptive Innovation
David: I've now turned to applying brand in different areas. In one of my books, I talk about branding and disruptive innovation, and the fact that in disruptive innovation, you have a lot of thought leaders, a lot of books and so on, but nobody mentions branding. So I point out that in branding, you need to become the exemplar, you got to define the disruptive innovation, you got to scale it, and you got to build barriers, and that's all branding. So what I've tried to do is to take branding and apply it to different areas, strategic areas that are adjacent to branding.
David Aaker’s Mentorship and Partnership with Scott Galloway
Andrew: So in addition to applying branding to areas that are adjacent to branding and your number of books and models and ideas you put forth, you've also spent decades as an educator in marketing. One of your students was Scott Galloway, whom you worked with at Prophet, and of course, he's one of the top marketing professors and recognizable thought leaders. And while researching your work, I came across a YouTube video of Scott, and he was talking about the impact you had on his life.
Scott Galloway (Video Clip Courtesy of The Brainwaves Video Anthology): The teacher that had the greatest influence on my life was David Aaker, who's a professor of marketing at the Haas School of Business. And David taught a class called brand strategy, and at the time in the early '90s, it was a fairly novel idea that you could manage brands as an asset and that potentially the most valuable assets of a company were its intangibles, whether it's Coke in America, whether it's Louis Vuitton and European elegance. But this notion of managing these intangibles that led to irrational behavior, which led to irrational margins and above-market return on investment and shareholder value, was a fairly novel thought. And I remember about halfway through the course thinking for the first time in my life knowing this is what I want to do with my life.
Andrew: I'll share this YouTube video link. If you haven't seen it — he speaks not only about this but about what an important impact you had on him as a person and as a role model. And I'm just curious about your initial interactions with Scott Galloway and if you knew immediately that he was a bright student or just what your initial collaboration with him was like.
David: Well, I'm a big fan of Scott's. I listen to his Pivot and Prof G. I think he's really so insightful and so knowledgeable, it's very impressive. He just again and again seems to have the right answers, and I wish people like him were running our government. He enticed me to join Prophet in 2000, and when I did that, I could see him in action. He started a company that was supposed to be a market research company, and he found out that people didn't pay for market research, but they did pay for having him come down and come into their office and tell them how dumb they were and they needed to change strategy. He was so good at that. He was — I mean, still is. I mean, he's got this ability to be very critical but at the same time be very helpful to companies that will listen to him. And then when I joined him, I told him he was trying to do brand work, and I said, "Scott, you need to have a brand model. You don't need mine, but you need a model." And that's when he got me to join, so he could have a model.
Brand Consultation and The Decline of the Tagline
Andrew: So in your decades as a brand consultant at Prophet, you worked with some of the world's most recognizable brands. And when it comes to companies and the branding challenges they face, and when they come to you for advice, what have you seen change over the years with them, and what's stayed the same?
David: You want to find out what you stand for, and you want to get these pillars, I now call them, that differentiate, that resonate, and that are doable. And then you want to get them done. But I get involved in tactics. I've been really patient with the inability of the Democratic Party to communicate its ideas. And when I looked out there, I see just a lot of ad hoc, sort of short-term messaging. There's no taglines that anybody remembers, there are no visual symbols that people remember. And I tried to encourage some to move in that direction, but it's hard to — it's hard to get in front of people.
Andrew: Taglines are really interesting. You mentioned how brand and brand equity is more than just two or three words, but it seems like taglines have sort of disappeared. And if you ask me, even from the last five years or more, I couldn't think of a major brand that has a tagline or a new tagline that's been introduced and had the impact the way something like "Just Do It" or "I'm Lovin' It" or "Think Different" or —
David: "The Ultimate Driving Machine" is probably the best tagline of all time.
Andrew: Yes, absolutely.
David: And that tagline tells you something about, what that car is made of, but also tells you that it's about sort of exhilaration, race driver exhilaration, and the word "driver." What an umbrella it's been for them to do so much. It's one of the things that's allowed them to do, really, is to move down, and they make small cars, they even make a Mini BMW, and it's okay because it still fits under the umbrella.
Andrew: Yeah, so I mean, BMW aside, why do you think taglines don't seem to have — they don't seem to be as prominent as they used to be? What would you attribute that to?
David: They're not easy to come up with. It's not easy to come up with the right umbrella. So you might need an umbrella for a campaign and then an umbrella for a bunch of campaigns, and it's not easy to come up with the right one. And if you don't come up with the right one, it's better not to even have one, although sometimes a tagline just for a single ad can be worthwhile. But anyway, that's one reason — it's not easy to come up with. I think the other reason is these creatives are so focused on the experience of the video or the article or the ad or the print ad, and they're really so focused on the content of the print or the characters in the video, and they just want to get that right, and they — and this tagline is kind of the strategic thing, it doesn't get as much attention, I think.
Andrew: Well, David, your insights and your stories have been incredibly valuable. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. How can our listeners learn more about your work and follow you online?
David: You can just go to davidaaker.com. My biggest — my blog output comes on LinkedIn, so you can connect to me on LinkedIn, and if you go to davidaaker.com, you'll get the blogs, too.
Andrew: I will share a link to davidaaker.com and to your LinkedIn page where listeners can follow you in the show notes. So David, thanks so much for your time.
David: Oh, thanks for having me.

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Mark Tungate: Advertising History from Ancient Pompeii to Today
23 jan· A History of Marketing
Today, my guest is journalist and author Mark Tungate. Mark has spent over 30 years covering the advertising, branding, and luxury industries.
Mark’s book Adland: A Global History of Advertising tells the story of the most influential people and iconic advertising campaigns from around the world. Mark is also the editorial director of the Epica Awards, a global creative competition judged by journalists.
Listen to the Podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
In this episode, we cover the ancient origins of advertising, the emergence of ad agencies, the creative revolution of the 1950s and 60s, and much more.
You can find more of Mark’s writing on LinkedIn and his photography on Instagram.
Now here it is: my conversation with Mark Tungate.
The Origins of "Adland": Approaching the Global History of Advertising
Andrew: Adland is an incredibly ambitious book. It covers the history of advertising, but it's not a picture book or an encyclopedia. It weaves several narratives of the people and the campaigns that define the industry, and it covers every continent, save for Antarctica. So what inspired you to take this on?
Mark: Simply because nobody else had done it, I think. I'd been writing about advertising for years at that point, and I was interested in advertising history because you want to know the background of the subject you're writing about. But it seemed to me that all the books on the subject were in silos, almost, or other country silos. It was like the history of British advertising, the history of US advertising, and then there were a whole bunch of places that nobody had ever really written about. So I thought, maybe I can take this thing on. Maybe it's me that should do this, rather arrogantly perhaps. But I thought, okay, let's give it a try. Let's see if we can do it.
Researching and Interviewing Industry Legends
Andrew: In our emails prior to this, you mentioned that you had a blast writing the book, and it certainly comes through on the page. It's a very, very fun read. So what was your approach to researching it, and what made it so fun?
Mark: Researching it was basic journalism in a way: existing sources, texts, articles, doing the background research, and then getting out there and interviewing people. Many of the people who'd made the interesting parts of advertising, or the most iconic parts of advertising, were still around. So I got to speak to them, which was absolutely amazing and probably the most fun part of writing the book. John Hegarty from BBH, George Lois—an absolute legend, really funny guy—Phil Dusenberry, the late, great Phil Dusenberry from BBDO. These people were living legends and really good fun to talk to.
Andrew: There are so many tremendous characters in this book. Did you ever find that advertisers, sort of being salespeople themselves, that they maybe talk up their own history or embellish? And as a journalist, did you have to validate things, or what was that process?
Mark: I guess that happened a lot. But what made it easy for me is that these people are storytellers. So you just sit there, and you turn on your tape recorder or your recording device, and they do the job for you. So that's great. Obviously, like with any interview you do, people exaggerate or they maybe misremember things. So you have to take everything with a dose of salt, and being skeptical is part of the job of being a journalist, I think. But by and large, I took them at their word.
Andrew: One of the lines in the introduction of your book resonated with me. It's from—you're quoting Colin Jones's book, Paris: A Biography of a City—and the quote goes, "No history of anything will ever include more than it leaves out." So it's impossible to include every ad from every campaign, from every product, from every company. So how did you approach what to include versus what was on the cutting room floor?
Mark: It's a good point. It sorted itself out in a way. I had a list of people, absolutely, and campaigns and characters, if you like, that I absolutely had to include—figures like Bernbach and Ogilvy and Mary Wells, or people I admired and wanted to interview. Others came up along the way. Like, I'd meet somebody who'd say, "Oh, you have to interview this guy, he's amazing," or, "You have to interview this person." That happened a lot.
But I didn't want it to be too much like an encyclopedia. I didn't want it to be like a series of Wikipedia entries. And it was in danger of getting that way at one point. So I wanted to tell the story of advertising. I wanted people to be able to read it as a story. I've always said I don't actually read many books about marketing, and I always want to write books about marketing that people could read on the beach.
So it became almost like a casting process where I would say to myself, okay, who's going to move the story forward, and who are the most interesting and fascinating people who are going to be great fun to read about? And that was how I made those decisions.
The First Signs of Advertising: Brothels in Pompeii, Posters, and Early Newspapers
Andrew: We only have so much time together, and this book captures centuries of history and multiple continents, so we'll only get to capture a small fraction of it. But I thought we could just start at the beginning. What were some of the earliest records of advertising you came across while researching the book?
Mark: It's quite controversial that. Some people say cave paintings were a form of advertising, which, okay. It's said that there are forms of advertising in Pompeii. Somebody told me that there was, apparently among the ruins of Pompeii, there was an ad for a brothel, which I joked about, the two oldest professions working together, which is a nice anecdote. I guess you have to take it slightly with a dose of salt—but advertising has been around forever. Ever since people have been selling stuff, there's been advertising. The word "poster," for example, comes from the word "post," so you're talking about posts driven into the ground with people sticking information to them. So that's been around forever. So, I think almost as long as there have been sort of speaking, intelligent human beings, there's probably been a form of advertising.
Andrew: I would say it gets a little bit to, what is the definition of it, somewhat. Because a sign outside of a shop that says "Goat for Sale" is sort of an advertisement, but it's not really the way that we think of it today. One of the early milestones happened in Paris, France. Can you tell the story of the first French newspaper and how it led to the first personal ads?
Mark: This was a guy with a name that's quite difficult to pronounce called Théophraste Renaudot. And he was a physician to Louis XIII, and he was also a philanthropist as well. So he wanted to help the poor, and he set up this—I guess the best way to describe it is a kiosk where people who had jobs could come and place advertisements, basically job ads, and say, "I need someone to chop wood or milk the cow or whatever." And unemployed people could come and look at these ads and basically get in touch with the people and apply for the jobs.
Théophraste decided that this wasn't enough. He wanted to circulate his job ads more widely, so he created this pamphlet, which became the first newspaper in France, although it only had job ads, it didn't have editorials at the time. But it was essentially what we think of today as being a newspaper. It was a folded sheet with information, and that information was jobs, people looking for hired help.
Andrew: It's amazing. One of the things about advertising today is it sort of subsidizes all of our free media, television and radio, and we get content in exchange for ads. And it strikes me, this is intertwined right from the beginning. I think this was 1631, so the first newspapers, intertwined—it's just remarkable that it happened.
Mark: As a journalist, that's why I've always quite enjoyed writing about advertising. And as a journalist, I felt that it was almost incumbent upon me to do that because, ads, if you're a journalist, ads basically pay your wages. There's no really getting around that. So I don't feel bad about writing about advertising.
Advertising Evolves: From Personal Ads to Ad Agencies
Andrew: So back then, these are personal ads, so it wasn't an ad agency doing that. Can you tell me about when the first advertising agencies started to emerge?
Mark: We're probably talking the 19th century when there was a lot more printed material around, particularly newspapers were really coming into their own at that point. So the first agencies were really what we might think of as media buying and selling agencies today. So they would be middlemen between the newspapers who had space to sell and the clients who wanted to buy that space. So those were the first agencies. They weren't creative agencies; they were representatives of the media.
Andrew: So these were people where, instead of going to—if I want to market a product, I don't want to go to every newspaper individually, I'd go to a middle person, a middleman who would sell the space, and they'd take a margin for it. And so when did creativity start entering the picture?
Mark: It's difficult to put a finger on, but I have the feeling that the clients basically started hiring copywriters to make their ads more interesting and more persuasive. So creativity began then. A lot of those people were also journalists, actually. And you find throughout advertising history that people flip between the two, as I've done actually. So I think that's really the start of creativity, but it was very much in its infancy at that point.
John E. Powers: “The Father of Creative Advertising”
Andrew: Your book cites that John E. Powers is known as the father of creative advertising. And whenever I see "the father of” anything, you have to think, “Okay, there are probably a lot of fathers.”
Mark: There's probably not just one.
Andrew: I think Ad Age cited him as the father of creative advertising. He worked primarily from the 1870s to the 1890s. And what's funny is today, I did look up some of his advertisements. You can see them on his Wikipedia page, and they're all pretty well preserved, and they don't seem very creative by today's standards. They're just walls of text. What do you think he did to earn this designation of "father of creative advertising"?
Mark: My feeling is that he was more thoughtful about it than anyone who had been before. He would experiment. He really wanted to try and form and craft the most persuasive sentence that he possibly could. So I think that, okay, maybe or maybe not he was the father of creative advertising, but I think he was the father of the real craft of copywriting in a very applied way.
So for me, that's his real contribution. He was almost a forerunner to somebody like David Ogilvy much later, who was also a great wordsmith. So I think that's where—that was his contribution, the craft of advertising, absolutely.
Andrew: I copied down an excerpt from your book. I'm going to read it out loud because I think it does capture some of that wordsmith. So Powers once claimed that, quote, "Fine writing is offensive. He concentrated on facts and regarded hyperbole as an anathema.”
And you tell the story of how he was hired by a Pittsburgh clothing company that was on the verge of bankruptcy, and he said, "There's only one way out," he told his client, "to tell the truth."
And the ad that he created read,
"We are bankrupt. This announcement will bring our creditors down on our necks, but if you come and buy tomorrow, we shall have the money to meet them. If not, we will go to the wall."
I just thought this is so funny. Like, imagine—it is sort of like the "Everything Must Go" liquidation-type sale. It just—do you have any reaction to this little excerpt here?
Mark: It's funny because he is telling the truth, but there's also a slightly emotional blackmail aspect to it as well. "You can do some good here, come and come and save us, come and come and buy some clothing and save us from bankruptcy, folks. This is a good thing that you're going to do here." So there is a, although he says, okay, no hyperbole or anything, there is a sneaky element of persuasion in there.
Andrew: I think the bluntness of "We are bankrupt," that is something that will catch your attention as well.
Mark: That's true. I don't think anybody's going to say that now, are they? They exactly couch it in more subtle, discreet terms these days, I suspect.
Albert Lasker: The Father of Modern Advertising
Andrew: So the next major figure I wanted to ask you about is Albert Lasker. And you write, "There were other contenders for the title, but few historians would disagree that Albert Lasker was the true father of modern advertising."
Mark: And there are too many fathers in my book, aren’t there?
Andrew: Every chapter has a father. (Laughs) So can you share a bit about who Albert Lasker was and what he contributed?
Mark: Lasker was another wannabe journalist, actually. And I think originally he wanted to go into journalism, but one way or another, he found himself working in this agency in Chicago called Lord & Thomas. And with a colleague of his, he developed, within the agency, a sort of copywriting school. So, they tried all sorts of tricks to try and capture people's attention, like using overusing capitals and overusing italics, which must have looked awful to today's eyes. But his idea was literally to grab eyeballs. And he ended up running the agency.
And the interesting thing about it was that he actually had a stable of 10 copywriters, which was unheard of because most agencies had like one or two. So I think what he did was that he turned advertising into something that was considered slightly dodgy and a bit sort of piratical and swashbuckling into a serious business. He made advertising respectable. I believe that was his contribution.
Andrew: A lot of advertising was for things called "patent medicines," which today we'd think of like snake oil salesman or something like that, where it's like, this is a very dubious medical product, and people are making claims. And that was a—how do you sell that to the masses? Well, advertising is one way. And it sounds like around this time, more established companies and reputable companies were working with agencies and embracing advertising as well.
Mark: That's exactly right. It went from the Wild West to a more modern America. And America was, certainly, I would say, the birthplace of modern advertising, for sure.
Andrew: We aren't going to have time to capture every biography of every person in this, but I'd be remiss not to mention—I'm just going to rattle off a bunch of names—J.C. Leyendecker, John E. Kennedy, Claude Hopkins, who I think was hired by Albert Lasker, absolutely, Harry McCann, Rosser Reeves, J. Walter Thompson, Stanley Resor, Bruce Barton, Leo Burnett, Raymond Rubicam, George Gallup, Ernest Dichter, and David Ogilvy. They're giants in advertising. I'm sure I hope to record podcasts someday on each of these figures.
Something that struck me is that they're all either Americans or they're immigrants who built their careers in America. They helped form this Chicago and Madison Avenue scenes of advertising. What was it that led modern advertising, the modern advertising industry, to take shape in America during this time, and specifically, what led to Chicago and Madison Avenue emerging as the main areas for advertising?
Mark: I think it was simply because the US was technologically and economically more advanced than Europe at the time. I mean, Europe was stuck in the 19th century until quite a long time after the First World War, indeed. I grew up in London in the 1970s, and sometimes London in the '70s still felt like it was stuck in the 19th century compared to New York. So, the US was forward-looking, it was inventive, it was the first with commercial radio, it was the first with the motor car, at least on a mass-produced basis. So there was stuff going on in America that made—there was stuff to sell. And when there's stuff to sell, advertising emerges to support it. So, that's my feeling about it. And of course, it attracted people, a bit like Hollywood in a way, which I guess was growing up around the same sort of time. It attracted people with sharp minds, business minds, a love of words, a lot of imagination, and they all congealed around these figures in Madison Avenue and in Chicago. That would be Leo Burnett, for example, and to create this nascent industry, which was full of smart, imaginative people working in a technological revolution, in a way.
The Creative Revolution: The “Mad Men” Era of Ads
Andrew: Let's jump ahead to the 1950s and the creative revolution. Up until this time, the art department and the copywriting departments were mostly kept separate. There were some ads that were really beautiful—beautiful artwork—but they weren't necessarily married in the same way to typography or to the words. And there were fantastic wordsmith ads, but they were sometimes walls of text that didn't really embrace visuals.
But all of a sudden, these things started getting intertwined. When this changed, advertising got a lot more exciting. If you look at some of the ads from now, they feel very contemporary, very modern, persuasive. They just look cool. So how did the creative revolution emerge, and who were the people responsible for ushering it in?
Mark: The creative revolution is probably my favorite era of advertising. And funny, just as an aside, when I was working on the book and I was already deep into it, I remember meeting a friend of mine, another journalist, in Cannes, where the big advertising festival takes place every year.
And he said, "Yeah, I was just thinking about you and your book because there's this new TV show that's coming out soon called Mad Men." He said, "You should get into it. I think you'd really like that." And so my book—I was actually in Madison Avenue researching the whole Mad Men era around the time that the series was just about to come out. It came out slightly after my book was published.
To answer your question, you can't talk about the creative revolution without talking about Bill Bernbach, who was the co-founder of DDB. And Bernbach had worked at another agency with a graphic designer called Paul Rand, who's incredibly famous. The IBM logo is his, basically. And they had always worked together, so they would build a concept up from the beginning with the art and the copy working together, which was insanely—hadn't really been done before.
So that was the idea and the magic that Bill took with him to DDB, which became the spark for the creative revolution. He also had—he also was a guy who was a wise cracker. He had a good sense of humor. He thought that people should be treated intelligently. He believed in irony and sarcasm, which had never really been used in advertising before. And to use your word, I think he thought that advertising should be intellectual and funny and cool at the same time. He was doing what jazz musicians were doing, I think, but with advertising. So he was trying to create something that was a bit more hip.
Andrew: I'm going to read a couple of quotes from your book related to this collaboration between Bernbach and Rand and let you react to them. So first, you quote, "Bernbach worked in tandem with Rand, his lively copy rendering the art director's images doubly effective. This was the birth of the creative team." I'm going to flash forward a bit. "When Bernbach opened his own agency, it was on this basis: copywriters and art directors working side by side." So it really was this that art directors and copywriters together were creating things from the beginning. Once Bernbach implemented this, this sort of became the standard for agencies. This was adopted more widely.
Mark: That's right. The creative revolution isn't just one agency. Other agencies began to say, okay, we should be doing this as well. And of course, what happens in any country, in any form of advertising, is you'll have a bunch of people who start this thing, and then they'll break off and form their own agencies, and it creates this ecosystem. That, in my book, I discovered that happened all the time. There was always one guy, or maybe a couple of guys, and they'd train the next generation who would go off. And sometimes you'd have these little explosions, these sort of constellations of creativity in different countries, started at one place. Interesting. So that's what happened there.
Andrew: And so what were some of the most iconic ads from this period of the creative revolution?
Mark: Well, the one that everybody talks about, and you can't get around, is "Think Small" for the VW Beetle. So basically—and I'm sure you've seen it—tiny VW Beetle in the midst of a vast blank, more or less, page.
The art director was Helmut Krone. And, this was in an era when cars were big and flashy, and advertising for cars was big and flashy. And here's this little tiny Beetle with a very short, sharp sentence, "Think Small." There was a bit of copy as well, of course, written by Julian Koenig, who was also part of the team.
And then there was another one in the same series called "Lemon," where it talked about how they would scrap certain Beetles because they weren't up to scratch, they weren't perfect enough. And so they were very eye-grabbing headlines, and the copy was very well-written and funny.
Another one I like from that era is—is for—I think it was a Christmas ad, actually, for Chivas Regal whiskey, and the line is, "Give Dad an expensive belt." And I think you've got the creative revolution right there. It's funny. It's managing to convey a sort of status on the drink by saying, by admitting it's expensive, but also in a very witty and almost like a throwaway line. I just think that's wonderful.
And then the third one I could probably talk about is the one for Avis, which was the second most popular car hire firm at the time, and the line was, "We Try Harder" because they're the second, so they have to try harder to get it. Again, telling the truth, but turning it around and making it funny and interesting.
Andrew: It's so brilliant. It's like embracing their positioning as second, which is very contrarian… To pitch that to a client, like, "Hey, don't try to hide this fact, you're second: embrace it." It's very bold as well.
Mark: That's the other thing as well. Not only did they have to come up with all this stuff, they had to sell it to the client. So there's talent right there. So, it's not just the creative, the account team are doing a great job here as well.
Andrew: We've cited a number of print advertisements, but the creative revolution also coincided with the emergence of television, of course. And television predates it a little bit, but it's around this time that it became—started to see some color. You started to see televisions in everybody's home, and television had a mass, much larger impact in the culture in the late '50s and '60s. Do you have any favorite television ads from this period?
Mark: The VW did one where, "How does the snowplow driver get to the snowplow?" So you see a little VW driving through the snow. That was a classic. And George Lois cites one—he worked at DDB, but I think he was already working at another agency at that time—where he was working on an ad for Xerox, and he made a film of a whole bunch of monkeys xeroxing, photocopying stuff to prove how easy it was to use the photocopier.
And that was apparently a bit of a breakthrough in TV advertising because it was controversial and fun. Once the creative revolution got going, TV advertising suddenly became entertaining.
Andrew: You mentioned the show Mad Men and how that was part of the creative revolution era of advertising. And in the show's name, it's Mad Men, and most of the names we've mentioned up to this point have been men. And it was, like a lot of industries, especially at this time, a very male-dominated field. One of the women advertising leaders of the creative revolution was Mary Wells. Can you tell me about who Mary Wells was and what her contributions were?
Mark: Mary Wells is one of my absolute heroes, or heroines, if you prefer, of advertising. Unfortunately, I never got to meet her. A fascinating person. She originally wanted to go into theater, she says, in her biography. And I think that's what, in a way, made her stand out because she realized that advertising could be about creating a theatrical experience, a dreamlike experience, in a way, by having this slight touch of magic about her. She became one of the biggest names in '60s advertising.
You may have seen, this is a famous one, it's a French tourism image she commissioned from the photographer Elliott Erwitt. And it's basically a father and son riding a bicycle. So the little boy is on the back of the bike, and it's shot from behind, and they're riding down this typical tree-lined road in the south of France somewhere. They're both wearing berets. I think the little boy is carrying a baguette. And it's like the whole of France is in this picture. It's irresistible. And so that was commissioned by Mary, and I think it captures her way of seeing the world as a kind of dreamlike place. And also, in the '70s, she was given the brief of making New York a more desirable place for tourists because you'd had the Son of Sam killings. New York was, in cinema, was portrayed as a downright violent place, and tourists didn't want to come.
Andrew: If you've seen Taxi Driver…
Mark: Exactly, yeah. So, she was given this brief, and so she worked with a designer, another famous designer called Milton Glaser. And Milton came up with "I Love New York," with the heart, "I heart New York."
And that was, under Mary's brief. So those two came up with this thing, which is still an icon today. It hasn't aged at all. So, even if that was her only contribution to advertising, and it wasn't, she would still deserve the legendary status that I think that she should have bestowed upon her.
Andrew: It's amazing how certain things, they just become such cultural icons, they almost feel like they're above advertising, in a way, where that—at the end of the day, "I heart New York," it's a tourism slogan. But it's been elevated to such a high stature in popular culture that it's on mugs and shirts and bumper stickers and everything. And it all ties back to an advertising campaign, too.
Mark: Absolutely, yeah.
Andrew: Well, all of my questions so far have been very American-biased. I'm showing my bias here.
Mark: Oh, don't worry, that's okay.
Andrew: And, Great Britain, around the time we're in, the 1970s, late '60s, '70s, this was a really booming era, and especially for television advertising. Filmmakers like Sir Alan Parker and Sir Ridley Scott, they started their careers in directing commercials. Can you share more about how the British pioneered television advertising?
Mark: I think a couple of things happened. I think that the Brits, people like Alan Parker, were jealous of the creative revolution and wanted to recreate it in London. And also, advertising in London was a quite freewheeling, dynamic industry. And so there was a lot of experimentation going on. And Alan Parker actually started making ads in the basement of the ad agency where he was working at the time. And don't forget that the Brits are all about the theater, right? Shakespeare, drama. And so, they were quite skilled, I think, at writing fairly decent scripts, ads that were—TV ads that had a story, a bit of a narrative arc, that were funny and sometimes even quite beautiful. And of course, because of all that, they stood out. And creativity and impact are never far apart. So if they stood out, they were successful. So, hey, let's have more. So I think that's how that began.
Andrew: It's cool that advertising, it's this confined medium. You only have 30 seconds usually, maybe a minute sometimes, to tell a very compelling story, grab somebody's attention, take some risks, stand out. And it becomes a sort of training ground for—you know, they're not Sir Alan Parker and Sir Ridley Scott because they're commercials. They reached that knighthood status because of how they took what they've learned in commercials and brought it to the cinema and brought it to storytelling. And absolutely, it is one of the cool benefits of advertising is that you see it as sort of a training ground for people who can go on to tell amazing stories and really influence the culture.
Mark: Oh yeah, there are many. David Fincher also worked in advertising, and there are others, you could—but yeah, that's that's true. It's a good training ground because I think you have to be economical, you have to tell a story in a short period of time, and you have to—it has to be action-packed. So yeah, all the elements that you see in films by Ridley and others.
Andrew: Britain in the '70s and '80s, this is a part—so I can tell by your accent you're British. What do you personally remember about British ads growing up? Are there anything that sets them apart, any things that come to mind?
Mark: I was born in '67, so, by the time I was 10, we're in the mid-'70s, and stuff is going on. And my dad always used to say, "The commercials are the best thing on the telly." And the thing is, at that point in time, he was right, because we had reruns of American shows. The own—the sort of own-brand British shows were made on a very small budget and were normally not that great.
And so when you had an amazing ad—I remember one particular one, it was from Saatchi & Saatchi, and it was for British Airways. And basically, the scene is, they land the entire island of Manhattan at Heathrow Airport using special effects. And it looked like something from a Spielberg movie. It looked like something from Close Encounters. It was amazing. I was blown away by this thing. And even now when you watch it, it's pretty impressive. And it was all about—I think the end line was like, "Every year, British Airways flies the entire population of Manhattan," or "the equivalent of the entire population of Manhattan from America to the UK." And I just thought, wow, this is—and I think that was the point, that ad was probably the point where I thought, actually, this advertising stuff's pretty cool. I didn't know I'd end up writing about it one day, but I think there was a point when I realized there was something interesting going on. So I remember that one in particular.
Andrew: So you mentioned Saatchi & Saatchi, and that's one of those iconic advertising firms that you still hold in high regard today. Can you tell me a bit about who Saatchi & Saatchi were and that origin story?
Mark: That was Maurice and Charles Saatchi, were brothers, of course. And I think one of them had been a journalist, but they certainly, like Charles was an art director and was interested in art, and of course went on to start the Saatchi Gallery and to work in the art business. So, they wanted to—again, I think that what happened there was they were ambitious to create a new advertising, which was perhaps more glamorous and more dynamic than some of the advertising that had been going on. So in that respect, I guess Saatchi & Saatchi were, in a way, our version of DDB in the United States, along with a couple of others. I mean, BBH, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, were very influential with their Levi's advertising as well in the '80s. So those are the two that, when you think about British advertising in that period, crop up quite a lot.
Andrew: We've talked about North America, we've talked about Britain, but one thing that I think, an ad that's very iconic that brings these together, is Apple's "1984" ad. It's widely considered as the greatest advertisement of all time, and it was developed by an American agency, Chiat/Day, but it was filmed in England, and it was directed by Sir Ridley Scott. Can you tell the story of this ad and describe the impact it had and its significance?
Mark: I think it marked the launch of a new era, in a way. It was the launch of the Apple Mac, which was cleverly positioned not as just a computer, but as a creative tool, which basically underpins the whole of Apple's image, ever since, "tools for creative people." And it was going against IBM, which is very much, "International Business Machines."
This is like the alternative. So that was clever. The ad itself is extremely atmospheric and imaginative. It seemed to be shot on a huge budget. I don't know whether it was, but it seemed to be. It looked like there was money on the screen. It was first shown on the Super Bowl, which also heralded that event as the annual showcase for the best advertising, which of course, it has now become. And when I think about it, it was the first time real life had caught up with science fiction.
Suddenly, we were living in the future with this ad because the end line is, "And that's why 1984 won't be like 1984." So these two worlds had collided: the world of literature and the world of computing, and also, on top of that, the world of advertising. So it was a magic potion, in a way. Total genius, actually.
Andrew: And it's one where it shows a few things. One, it shows Steve Jobs' timing, or Apple's timing. It's one—you couldn't do that in 1983, you couldn't do that in 1985. You had to do it in 1984 and have it be the ad that ties to this iconic book, a major event like the Super Bowl. It came at the beginning of 1984 as well, so they're able to use it for the rest of the year. And then it's also one where you don't see the product at all. You don't see computers in use. It sort of just is all about an emotion, a time, a feeling, and somehow it works, and it captures a lot of attention.
Mark: It's almost an anti-computer ad, bizarrely, but so yeah, it's—I believe Lee Clow was one of the people behind that, at TBWA.
Andrew: So we've covered ancient advertising up to 1984, and I've only covered a small portion of Adland. And I want to ask a few more questions, and I want to read one of your quotes that comes near the conclusion of the book.
"If the history of advertising has one overriding theme, it is this constant tug of war between two schools: the creatives, who believe art inspires consumers to buy, and the pragmatists, who sell based on facts and come armed with reams of research."
If you were to look at the past few decades, or if you looked over the history of advertising, who would you say is winning the tug of war? Has it shifted over time from these creatives and the pragmatists? Who's winning today? What are your thoughts on this idea?
Mark: It's funny how you change because I wrote that book a while back, and I was definitely on the side of the creatives because I guess I saw myself as a—I was a writer, so I saw myself as this creative person, not interested in, and I hate math, I'm terrible at maths, and the data guys represented math, like the math teacher. But, I've grown perhaps a bit more mature since then, I hope so anyway. And to be fair, now I think it's—I think the ideal is a mixture of both. So creativity inspired by solid research, inspired by data. But I would say I still think that creativity is the key to a message you remember, which is the goal of all advertising. And creativity is a very intangible human thing. So I don't think creativity will ever be replaced by AI, for example, which is a whole other conversation we could get into. So for me, creativity is—I mean, Bill Bernbach, talking about him, he said creativity was perhaps the last unfair advantage that business people had. And I like that idea of creativity being an unfair advantage because it's not easy to do, and if you have it, you're good.
Andrew: If I was to think of this tug of war, clearly during the creative revolution, the creative part was winning the tug of war. If I think of the post-internet era of advertising, I think that the pragmatists, or that has become much more data science-oriented. What's our cost per click, what's the very measurable ROI? And there are moments where creativity shines through, and of course, they work together. But if I was to really be forced to pick one today, or since the launch of the internet, really, I'd probably lean towards the pragmatists sort of starting to win more of the battle or shape more of the industry. Is that—does that align with you, or what's your reaction to that?
Mark: It's interesting. What I find is that the creatives who, I think, resisted big data, or some of them did, have now accepted that it can make their work better because it's made it easier to talk to a smaller bunch of people. So, to target your advertising, to know who you're dealing with, rather than just throwing it out there. Because, with a TV commercial in the old days, you really didn't know who you were getting. I mean, there were ways of, there were focus groups and stuff like that.
But, a TV ad would go out into masses and masses of households, and only a certain amount of those people were in the market for a car. Whereas now, you can probably find out exactly who's in the market for a car and fire the ad at them. So I think the creatives have learned to deal with that world and to work within it. But I think they're still allowed, and indeed encouraged, to come up with these ideas that are quite magical. I mean, you mentioned earlier that I'm involved in the Epica Awards, which is a creative prize given by journalists. And every year, I'm staggered by the amount of creativity and innovation and wonderful ideas that emerge. So yes, data is important, yes, there are more facts to inspire creativity, but creativity, really, it'll never die. It's still there, and I think it's still holding its head more than holding its head above water, that's for sure.
Andrew: Yeah, and it is, in some ways, it's presented as opposing forces. I think there are plenty of examples of them working best together, and not just recently. Like, one ad that comes from David Ogilvy, who we mentioned earlier, is he was always doing a lot of research on his clients.
He had this ad for Rolls-Royce in which he said, "At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock." And it's very creative. You wouldn't think to—all the things of a Rolls-Royce, you wouldn't think that the ad would showcase the electric clock. And it's very surprising, but it's very—you just imagine him reading every little thing he could about this car and this coming out and using that research and the data and all the stats about it and highlighting the one that could capture somebody's imagination and their attention.
Mark: Yeah, that's very Ogilvy, that would—that he believed in research. He worked with George Gallup for a while, and so Ogilvy was quite a rational person, but he was capable of turning facts into gold with his pen. He was a terrific writer, so that's what made him one of the creative revolutionaries as well, I think.
Andrew: So you published the first updated second edition in 2013, so we're probably 12 years on by the time this is published. Do you have any plans for a third edition of this book?
Mark: I would love to say yes, but right now—writing a book is a lot of fun, but it's also extremely time-consuming, and it's really hard work. So although there's a lot to say, particularly about the digital era—I scratched the beginnings of the digital era, particularly in the second edition of the book—so there's a lot more to say, but right now I prefer to say it in the articles I write and in the interviews I'm doing on a more or less day-to-day basis than to tackle another book. But hey, never say never. Maybe I'll just get inspired one day and say, okay, let's do this. Maybe I'll get frustrated and say, no, we need to do a third edition. So never say never, but there's not one cooking at the moment, no.
Andrew: And you mentioned your work today and the Epica Awards. Can you tell me about what the Epica Awards are and what your role in it is?
Mark: I work for—my day job, if you like, is I'm a journalist for a site called AdForum, which is a B2B site for people who work in the ad industry. And we have an awards, the Epica Awards, which started out as the Editors and Publishers International Creative Awards, but people just call it Epica now. And so the idea is that once a year, we invite agencies—not just advertising agencies, but design agencies, production agencies—to send us their best work. And we get around a table with a whole bunch of leading journalists, and we decide which is the most interesting and the most creative and innovative out of all that work, and we give some prizes and make a few people happy. So it's kind of a great job, writing and writing about and rewarding creativity. There are worse jobs to have than that, so I enjoy it very much.
Andrew: And yeah, seeing and thinking about some of the best campaigns in the world, it just sounds like a fun job in general.
Mark: Yeah, no, I got—and I get my, my boy is 13 now, so I get him embroiled. So when I'm watching something really cool, I say, "Come look at this, this is cool." So now he wants to work in advertising, too.
Andrew: That's amazing. Well, Mark, I've truly enjoyed this conversation, and I had an absolute blast reading Adland. I recommend it to everybody who's listening. How can listeners learn more about your work, can follow you online?
Mark: I'm on LinkedIn, where I publish quite a few of my articles, or I link to quite a few of my articles, so you can find me there. If you want to find out about my more domestic life, life in France, and also my own attempts at creativity because I'm interested in photography, I'm pretty active on Instagram as well. So you can come and stalk me there. So those are the best two places, I guess, right now.
Andrew: Thank you so much, Mark. I truly enjoyed this conversation.
Mark: Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It was a real honor, and I'm very happy to have been on the show.

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Guy Kawasaki: The Remarkable Rise of Evangelism Marketing
21 jan· A History of Marketing
Listen to the Podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube Podcasts
Welcome to episode two of A History of Marketing. I'm Andrew Mitrak, and today my guest is Guy Kawasaki. Guy shaped the field of marketing by popularizing the idea of evangelism marketing. Today, there are more than 10,000 technology, brand, and product evangelists on LinkedIn, and that wouldn't have happened without Guy.
Guy worked at Apple during some of their most iconic marketing moments, so he shares an insider's perspective on the launch of the Macintosh, the 1984 Super Bowl ad, and the "Think Different" campaign. Guy is also a teacher; he's written many books about marketing and entrepreneurship, and I talk in the episode about how his books influenced me personally as a marketer. If you like this conversation, definitely check out Guy's Remarkable People podcast, where he interviews the likes of Steve Wozniak, Arianna Huffington, Seth Godin, and hundreds of others. Now, here it is: my conversation with Guy Kawasaki.
Read the full transcript:Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.
Andrew Mitrak: Guy Kawasaki, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, thank you. I think that's a great name for a podcast, A History of Marketing. You've got a lot of material to cover there, Andrew.
Andrew Mitrak: There's a whole lot of history. I don't know if we'll get to every single campaign and every brand, but we'll try. I want to start by saying what an honor it is to speak with you. When I was a marketer for startups, your book The Art of the Start 2.0—it was the 2.0 version—was one of those books that I just referenced over and over.
Guy Kawasaki: Wow.
Andrew Mitrak: And I feel like I'm speaking to my teacher, so it's amazing.
Guy Kawasaki: Well, I hope you, as a student, got value out of the book.
From Law School Dropout to MBA
Andrew Mitrak: Got a lot of value out of it. So, I want to start this conversation way back before you even started your career. In your book Wise Guy, you write about the time you went to law school. And then you dropped out after a week and changed paths to get your MBA, and you majored in marketing.
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: What was it that drove you to an MBA in marketing?
Guy Kawasaki: I wanted to be an entrepreneur as opposed to a lawyer. This is back in the mid-70s. And back then, if you're Asian-American, your parents want you to be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer. So, I tried the doctor route, and I fainted in the hospital, so I knew doctor was out. And then I read some article about dentists having the highest rate of suicide, so dentistry was out. So, all that was left was lawyer. And my father was a legislator in the state of Hawaii; he had never gone to college. So, it was kind of his dream that his son would go to college, go to law school, and all that kind of stuff. And I hated law school. I hated it so much I quit after a week.
Andrew Mitrak: After you quit law school, what was it that drove you to pursue an MBA and focus on marketing, of all things?
Guy Kawasaki: The interesting thing is that back then, an MBA was some kind of dues that you paid. And if you wanted to get ahead in business, you had an MBA. And so, back then, in that 1970-1980 timeframe, we had to get an MBA to get good positions in business.
The Value of an MBA for Entrepreneurs
Guy Kawasaki: Now, of course, the interesting thing is, if someone were to ask me today, "Do I need to get an MBA to be an entrepreneur?" I would tell you absolutely not. That it is neither necessary nor sufficient. And what you should do is, if you're the geek, find the marketer; if you're the marketer, find the geek, and get rolling. You shouldn't go get an MBA.
Andrew Mitrak: Your LinkedIn profile says this: "Education: UCLA MBA." And your quote on it is, "I've come to believe that an MBA is a hindrance to entrepreneurship, but I do have one from UCLA.”
Guy Kawasaki: At least I'm honest.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that there was any value from your marketing courses, or were you taught things that were able to apply?
Guy Kawasaki: I can't exactly condemn the whole MBA program. It's not exactly the MBA's fault; you get out of a degree what you put into the degree. And the funniest thing is, I became very good friends with my marketing professor. To this day, we're friends. And yes, I learned the classical marketing things from Philip Kotler, like the five P's or the four P's or the three P's, or whatever those P's are. I got a bunch of P's: price, promotion, place, and—
Andrew Mitrak: Product.
Guy Kawasaki: Product! Product, price, place, promotion. So, I learned that, and I learned classical marketing lingo. So, when a consulting firm comes into your company and tries to BS you with marketing terms, it'd be nice to know the marketing terms they're trying to BS you with.
Learning Sales and Marketing in the Jewelry Business
Andrew Mitrak: A lot of people who get MBAs join those consulting firms, but you didn't do this. While you were in business school, you worked part-time at a jewelry company.
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: And to quote your book, "I started out by counting diamonds and left five years later as the vice president of sales and marketing." So, what does sales and marketing look like for a jewelry company in the 1970s?
Guy Kawasaki: The jewelry business is hand-to-hand combat. You have to learn how to sell. Now, when people hear in 2024 "learning to sell," you're thinking, "Oh, it's a Google A/B test," or "You're testing various forms of ChatGPT text." That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about hand-to-hand combat sales. In jewelry, it means you make an appointment with a fine jewelry retailer, you fly to Kansas City, the appointment is at 10:00, they finally come out and say hello to you at 11:00, then they keep you waiting another hour, and then they give you 15 minutes for you to show them your line. And in that 15 minutes, they're telling you your stuff is too expensive, and "We can get this anywhere cheaper," and blah blah blah. So, you learn patience, you learn rejection, you learn a lot of things that are very useful for the rest of your life.
Andrew Mitrak: Totally. So, it sounds like this job was a little more sales than marketing, is that fair?
Guy Kawasaki: Well, let me put it to you this way, Andrew: I believe that all of life is sales. People think sales is just this act of taking these orders down or having people click through and put something in a shopping basket and then use Apple Pay to pay. But I'm telling you, life is sales. You sell to get a date, you sell to get a job, you sell to get an upgrade to first class on United even though you got a coach fare, you're selling the front desk clerk to give you a corner room because you need more space to have meetings in the morning. You're selling the clerk to say, "Checkout is at 11:00, but I got a meeting at 12:00. Can I get a late checkout?" I hate to tell you, but life is sales.
How a Love of Cars Led to a Career at Apple
Andrew Mitrak: So, moving on past the jewelry company, you joined Apple in 1983, which seems like a really exciting time to join Apple. And it was Mike Boich, who was the first software evangelist, who hired you.
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: And you write in your book that Steve Jobs told Mike, "You can hire Guy, but you're betting your job on him." And so, do you know why Mike was willing to bet his job on you? What was it that got you this role?
Guy Kawasaki: Well, it was 100% pure, honestly, nepotism. We were very good friends at Stanford. I'm going to take you down a little bit of a rat hole. When I was a young kid in Hawaii, somebody gave me a ride in his Porsche 911. And when I rode in that 911, I said, "Oh my God, this is why you gotta study, Guy. This is why you gotta work hard because you don't want to buy a used Toyota Corona for the rest of your life. You want to drive a German or Italian car." And I fell in love with cars, and I was obsessed with cars.
Then I get to Stanford, and I meet this guy named Mike Boich. He too was obsessed with cars. The difference between me and him is that I wanted to have cars, and he was from a wealthy family; he had nice cars.
He had a Ford GT40, which is probably worth $5 million today, although he doesn't have it because he made one of the worst deals in the history of automotive trades. He traded a Ford GT40 for a 1976 911 Turbo. That 911 Turbo might be worth, I don't know, $150,000 today, but it would be much better to have the Ford GT40.
So, anyway, we get to Stanford, somehow we meet, and we forge this friendship over cars, not over computer science, not over Apple I, not over programming BASIC or FORTRAN, anything like that. Our friendship was based on a love of cars. And then we graduated, and he went to Hewlett-Packard, and from Hewlett-Packard, he got a promotion and went to Apple's Mac division. And then he called me up, and he said, "We need somebody to be an evangelist." And I'm telling you, 90% of my qualifications was that I was his friend.
The Origins of the Term "Software Evangelism"
Andrew Mitrak: So, he calls you up and says, "We want an evangelist." And evangelist was kind of a new word; it was unique to Apple. I think you write that Mike Murray, the director of marketing for Macintosh, he's the one who coined this term "software evangelism."
Guy Kawasaki: Well, there was Jesus before Mike Murray.
Andrew Mitrak: Right. But that's exactly right. That evangelism is this term that's really associated, up to that point, with religion. And what was your reaction to, "Is my job title going to be 'evangelist'?" Was there any explaining you had to do when your business card said "evangelist"?
Guy Kawasaki: There were people who looked askance at that concept. Particularly if you were a hardcore Christian, you're thinking, "What are these punks from Silicon Valley? They're appropriating our word. Jesus and John, and now Mike and Guy—not quite the same category there, bro." So yeah, there was some of that. There was some pushback in the sense of, "What the hell does an evangelist do? They're the guys who tell me to come down during the Sunday service and give witness to Christ. Is that what you're asking me to do?" Well, in a sense, we were asking them to come down and embrace Macintosh, but that's not exactly evangelism in their minds. And I want people listening to this to understand that evangelism comes from a Greek word meaning "bringing the good news." And so, what I did was I brought the good news. I brought the good news that Macintosh would make you more creative and more productive because of its graphical user interface and its WYSIWYG printing. I brought the good news to developers that this is a product that—you're no longer just dependent on the IBM PC. We have much, much richer ROMs, so you can program the software you always dreamed of creating. And this easy-to-use, fun, cool computer will open up a market to people who would have never bought a computer. So, that was the Macintosh religion. And so, my job was to bring the good news of Macintosh evangelism to developers so that they would create Macintosh products.
Guy Kawasaki: ‘The Father of Evangelism Marketing’
Andrew Mitrak: Now, you weren't the first evangelist, and you didn't come up with evangelism, but if you think of who in the world is most associated with evangelism for a product or for technology, or in the secular sense, it'd be Guy Kawasaki.
Guy Kawasaki: I think that's a good thing.
Andrew Mitrak: I think it's a good thing. I looked around, and sometimes you've been referred to as the "father of evangelism marketing," and—
Guy Kawasaki: Well, to be quite honest, Mike Boich was the first evangelist, the first secular tech evangelist. I was the second one, but I get all the credit.
Andrew Mitrak: I think we'll go on to later, as we get further forward in your career, you did evangelize this concept of evangelism. And so, what did the daily work of an evangelist look like at that time?
Guy Kawasaki: The big picture is we bring the good news. So, the concept is, how do you bring the good news? And what we did is basically, we did a lot of demos. We showed people MacWrite and MacPaint. And basically, if you saw MacPaint or MacWrite in the mid-80s, having used the Apple II's DOS and character operating system, or the IBM PC's MS-DOS operating system, and you saw MacPaint and MacWrite in the Macintosh Finder, it was a religious experience. And so, we would show them the good news and ask them to believe in Macintosh as much as we did.
Secrecy and the Macintosh Launch
Andrew Mitrak: You joined in '83 as an evangelist for the Macintosh, and the Macintosh hadn't launched yet, right? So, did you have to have people sign NDAs or carry it in a secret suitcase, or what was that like?
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, to get a Macintosh demo, you had to sign an NDA. And if you wanted to get a Macintosh prototype, you had to give us your firstborn child. But yeah, there was a lot of secrecy. And, I actually think that the secrecy added to the mystery and the romance of this computer. I'm not telling you we were paranoid in doing this because we were such sly marketers, we said, "We don't care if everybody knows about it, but let's make it really hard to find out just for marketing purposes." No, we really wanted it to be a secret and make a big splash on January 24th, 1984.
Inside Apple's Iconic 1984 Super Bowl Ad
Andrew Mitrak: I think I know what you're referring to. This is like a natural segue to what's often referred to as the best advertisement of all time: Apple's 1984 ad that aired at the Super Bowl. When did you first see the ad? What was your initial reaction to it?
Guy Kawasaki: I saw it on January 24th, 1984, on TV. There was a very small group of people who had seen that ad. It was Mike Murray because he was in charge of marketing, Steve Jobs obviously, probably Steve Jobs' direct reports. But, I don't want to give you the impression that I was BFFs with Steve Jobs. I was, like—let's see, I was—it was Steve Jobs to Mike Murray to Mike Boich to Guy.
Andrew Mitrak: What was the reaction among other Apple employees or other folks in the sales and marketing team when they saw this ad for the first time?
Guy Kawasaki: That's a mixed bag because, at that time, the Apple II was the shipping computer. The Apple II was 100% of the revenue, right? And yet, there was this small collection in the Macintosh division who thought that our product was so much better, even though your product is paying for our product, and your product is paying for our salaries, and your product is paying for our building and everything. But we were the handpicked, spoiled brats of Steve Jobs. So, there was some resentment, honestly, and I can't say I blamed them. And then, in a sense, there was always a battle for developers, right? So, for developers making Apple II software, and then Guy and Mike Boich show up and say, "We want you to do Macintosh software." Well, guess what? The Apple II people weren't exactly thrilled that we were trying to convince people to do Macintosh software. But eventually, Macintosh, honestly, killed the Apple II. But it was walking a tightrope there because you don't want to kill the Apple II, you don't want to kill the cash cow before the calf is born, to use a totally farming metaphor.
Andrew Mitrak: Did this ad make your job easier? Did people want to buy and develop for the Macintosh because of this ad, or what did it do?
Guy Kawasaki: It made it much easier because people were so intrigued by, "What could this Macintosh be? And it's so revolutionary, and it's so different, and it's so mysterious, and it's so cool, and it had this great ad." That nobody had ever seen an ad like that before. And that ad, which was almost killed by the board of directors, but that ad was a tremendous marketing tool. Tremendous.
Evangelizing Evangelism: Guy’s Books and Influence
Andrew Mitrak: So, from 1983 to 1987, you were on the evangelist team for the Mac, and then you left Apple in 1987. You write books like The Macintosh Way and Selling the Dream, and this is when you kind of became something of an evangelist for the concept of evangelism. You start writing publicly about evangelism. What drew you to do this, first off? And then also, did you see other companies start to also hire evangelists around this time?
Guy Kawasaki: I will say that the creation of the secular evangelist career didn't take off that fast because there are not a lot of companies like Apple. And it's not so important semantically that you use the word "evangelist." What's important is the concept that you are marketing something that is good news, and the good news is not for your benefit; it's for the benefit of the customer, right? So, the difference between evangelism and most sales is that most sales is about the salesperson. "This is my quota, this is my bonus, this is my salary, please buy my widget so I can make my bonus." With Macintosh—and I tell you, this is—I absolutely, 100% promise you this was true—that when we were evangelizing Macintosh, we believed in our heads, "Yes, it's good for us as Apple employees, but it's also very good for you because you will become more creative and productive." So, it's not just about me making my quota; it's about you improving your life.
Returning to Apple as Chief Evangelist
Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. Now, you returned to Apple in the mid-90s, this time as Chief Evangelist.
Guy Kawasaki: Yes.
Andrew Mitrak: How had evangelism at Apple evolved between the time you left and when you returned?
Guy Kawasaki: Well, I left in '87, and I returned in '95. And those were a few difficult years. John Sculley was fired, Steve Jobs was fired, layoffs, everybody thought Apple was gonna die. So really, I was brought back to maintain the Macintosh cult and maintain the macOS developer community, as a chief evangelist, chief cheerleader, all that kind of good stuff. It was a glorious time. It was the most satisfying work to—it sounds immodest, but I kind of helped Apple survive that period.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it was really in a bad spot. This is the time where, I think it was—what was—Michael Dell saying they should just sell the company and return it to shareholders?
Which is probably the worst call of all time, maybe. But anyway, it turns around at this time. And it does seem like, in that late '90s, mid-late '90s period, and when you returned, Apple does really turn around.
Guy Kawasaki: Well, I could actually make the case, if you really knew, whenever I left, Apple turned around. Because I left in '97, and then it started really doing well. And I am no Steve Jobs, I am no Steve Wozniak, I'm no Tim Cook. Don't give me too much credit.
Behind the Scenes of Apple's "Think Different" Campaign
Andrew Mitrak: One of the things during this turnaround is another top Apple campaign: the "Think Different" campaign. And you were in the room when Lee Clow from Chiat\Day presented this campaign for the first time. Can you describe what this presentation was like?
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, so this is just as Steve is about to return, having been purged from Apple. So, he was coming back after the purge. And back then, it was kind of really almost a negative to use a Macintosh because this is a tarnished company, and it was going to die, and blah blah blah. Although the Macintosh believers never really bought into that, I'll tell you that. The faithful were faithful all through that. And so, we couldn't exactly make a credible case that, "This is the safe purchase," that "This is mainstream," that "This is conservative," and "This is logical," and all that. So, the people at Chiat, they came up with this genius ad campaign about, "If you want to be like Pablo Picasso or Richard Branson or Jim Henson or Amelia Earhart or Gandhi." So, basically, the campaign was, "These are the kinds of people who think different, and if you want to think different and be remarkable like them, you would use a Macintosh." And that ad, that whole sentiment, just so fit in with the mentality of the Macintosh employee, Macintosh believer.
Andrew Mitrak: So the words "Think Different," I recalled in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, and he wrote, quote, "They debated the grammatical issue. If 'different' was supposed to modify the verb 'think,' it should be an adverb, as in 'think differently.' But Jobs insisted 1 he wanted it to be 'different.'" I'm like, "Oh my gosh, how could they have ever considered 'think differently?'" Were you present for this debate at all, and do you recall this happening?
Guy Kawasaki: Nope, nope, nope. I was just a little peon. No, I cannot take any credit for that. I was just in the room, and it was unveiled. So, no, that was the genius of Lee Clow and the team at Chiat\Day. I had nothing to do with it. And anyway, I'm very glad they didn't use the adverb.
Andrew Mitrak: I don't think we'd be talking about it today if it was "Think Differently."
Standing up to Steve Jobs
Andrew Mitrak: So, would you be open to sharing the story of what happened after this presentation?
Guy Kawasaki: Of course. So, Lee Clow gives this presentation of "Think Different" to the marketing department. There had to be, I don't know, 15, 20 marketing people there. At the end, Lee Clow says, "I have two copies of the videotape, Steve, of all the ads. I'm going to give you one copy and one copy to Guy." And Steve says, "Don't give it to Guy." So, I said to Steve, "What's the matter, Steve? Don't you trust me?" And Steve, as only Steve would, he says, "Yes, Guy, I do not trust you." And this is one of those moments in your life where, if you look back and say, "Why was I such a wimp? Why did I just back down and say, 'Oh, it's okay, Steve. Yeah, you're Steve Jobs. I'm just a little pimple on the face of this earth.'" So, that was a man or mouse moment. And so, when he said that, I said, "It's okay, Steve, I don't trust you either." And it probably cost me $250 million, but it was worth it.
Andrew Mitrak: For me, the story, it really strikes a nerve. I think we've all been in some situation where somebody who's higher up, they're being somewhat of a bully or just flexing their power or diminishing their team or something.
Guy Kawasaki: Me—well, but the funny thing is, a few years later, Steve offered me another job, but like a jack**s, I turned that down.
Guy Kawasaki on Evangelizing Canva
Andrew Mitrak: Moving on to one that seems to be a very good call to work with is Canva. You're now the chief evangelist at Canva. They make a great product; I use it for this podcast. What does your role as an evangelist look like today?
Guy Kawasaki: Well, it's just like before. I'm telling the good news of Canva. So, what Canva does is it empowers people to be better communicators because it empowers you to create your own graphics. And that wasn't something people could do before. If you've ever tried Illustrator or Photoshop, you know that you don't just whip those things out and start creating great graphics. So, Canva democratized design just like Macintosh democratized computers. So, I like to democratize things.
Andrew Mitrak: Being an evangelist in this day and age, there's social media today; there wasn't back in the '80s. Canva is a software product that's online, and the Macintosh was before the internet as we know it today, and it was a hardware product. Is your role as an evangelist strikingly different with Canva now versus Mac back then?
Guy Kawasaki: Well, obviously, in evangelizing Canva, you had more technology than a fax machine and a cell phone in the trunk of your car. So, that helps. There's all these online services, these social media platforms. There's where to send graphics. In fact, the ability for people to send graphics is kind of like the inflection point that made Canva so useful, right? If there was no need to send graphics with Twitter, well, guess what? People wouldn't be making graphics, and if they wouldn't be making graphics, they didn't need Canva. So, it all kind of worked out. And yes, Canva is online, software as a service, and Macintosh is plastic and silicon and glass and steel. But I think it's more similar than different, that it's good news. Good news is good news.
The Impact of Social Media on Evangelism
Andrew Mitrak: Outside of evangelism—I could probably spend hours asking you questions about social media—how has social media impacted evangelism?
Guy Kawasaki: Well, social media has impacted evangelism because it gives you a way to spread the good news better than anything ever before. I don't know how much it cost to make the 1984 commercial—land, let's say it's a million. Let's say the spot was 5 million. So, 6 million to run a 1984 commercial. You can buy a lot of ads on social media for $6 million, especially $6 million in 1984, what it would be today. So, the technology has made spreading the good news much easier. Of course, the technology has also made spreading bad news and the incorrect news and the conspiracy news easier, too.
Andrew Mitrak: So there's more noise.
Guy Kawasaki: That's right. I bet if anybody spent $6 million on a social media ad today, though, we wouldn't be talking about it 40 years from now in 2065, the way we're talking about the Apple 1984 ad, though. So, there's something about that.
Guy Kawasaki's Unique Method for Collecting Quotes
Andrew Mitrak: As we start to wrap up, one kind of random question for you, or a fun one, is that in all of the books of yours that I read, you start each chapter with a quote. And I was writing down these quotes because they're all so great. And you seem to collect and find the perfect quote for the perfect chapter. How do you go about collecting and keeping track of your favorite quotes?
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, I don't know where I started that practice. I must have read somebody else's book who did that, and I thought, this is like—I would say, when you have that at the start of a chapter, it's kind of like when you have a banana split, and the first thing you eat is the cherry, right? So, that's the cherry on top. And so, in the old days, when I had to find these quotes, I had all these—I had literally, I don't know, a dozen books of quotes. It was—God—oh, Bartlett's, I think it was, like, Bartlett's Book of Quotations.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki: So, there was Bartlett's and all that. So, literally, I would just go—it was just brute force. And then the next generation of Guy finding good quotes was Goodreads because Goodreads has these favorite Goodreads quotes where you can just put in the word "innovation," and it'll give you every quote about innovation. But now, in my latest book—because I just finished another book. It's called Wiser Guy. I did a book five years ago called Wise Guy, and now I just completed a book called Wiser Guy. God forbid, maybe someday I'll write Wisest Guy, but right now, we're gonna stick with Wiser Guy. And I gotta tell you, you just go to ChatGPT or any AI model, and you say, "Give me 20 quotes about innovation." And two seconds later, you have 20 quotes about innovation from Tom Peters or Steve Jobs or, God forbid, Bill Gates or Elon or whatever. You got these 20 quotes, and then you pick the one that you like. And then you ask Madison—Madison, please make sure that ChatGPT didn't hallucinate that Isaac Asimov said this. Make sure that Isaac Asimov really did say this about innovation because I don't want to make an ass of myself and put in my book an Isaac Asimov quote that ChatGPT hallucinated. So, now finding those quotes is very easy.
Well, it's very easy to get a bunch of quotes to pick from. I would say it's still somewhat of an art to figure out which one of those 20 you pick.
Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. I'm glad that fact-checking was part of the process there.
I copied down a lot of quotes, but one that I feel like a fitting place to part with, "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." And that's from Pericles. And I just thought that one was—
Guy Kawasaki: Was that Wise Guy?
Andrew Mitrak: That was in Wise Guy. That was a very good one, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki: Yeah. Well, I hope Pericles really said that.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it was in Greek, I'm sure it was translated.
Guy Kawasaki: I've never had anybody send me a message that says, "You know what? You said Aristotle said that? It wasn't Aristotle; it was Karl Marx or something."
Guy Kawasaki's Advice for Aspiring Marketers
Andrew Mitrak: As we wrap up, you've had a long career in marketing. What are some words of wisdom that you would share with marketers who are listening to this podcast who want to become better marketers themselves?
Guy Kawasaki: I've had a wonderful life being an evangelist and a marketer. And so, this is advice from an old evangelist and marketer to, I hope, young evangelists and marketers.
The first thing you need to understand is that it is not about you; it is about them. So, if you think that you're going to use this sales technique or this marketing technique or this evangelism technique to get your quota and bonus, and it's all about you, you're going to fail. Well, actually, you might succeed, but you won't be an evangelist. So, you gotta be thinking—you gotta work backwards from the customer, not forward from what you want to do. That's number one.
Number two piece of advice is, you have got to learn how to demo your product because the demo is the most important part of evangelism. It's not the pitch, it's not the baloney text, even that ChatGPT generated. It's, how good can you demo your Macintosh or your Canva or your motorcycle or your electric car or your software service, whatever it is. You gotta do good demos. If you cannot do a good demo, you're gonna suck as an evangelist. So, get that through your thick skull.
And the third thing is that, as an evangelist, just remember, always think, "Good news, good news, good news. It's not about me; it's good news. What is the good news I'm bringing?" And that's about all I can tell you about evangelism.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, Guy, thanks so much for this conversation. It's been an absolute blast. I've really enjoyed it.
Guy Kawasaki: Thank you very much.

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Dr. Philip Kotler: 'The Father of Modern Marketing'
15 jan· A History of Marketing
Welcome to the first episode of A History of Marketing. This podcast is a quest to understand how marketing evolved and today, we kick off this quest with an absolute legend: Dr. Philip Kotler, also known as the 'father of modern marketing.'
When I originally had the idea for this podcast, Phil was the very first person I reached out to, and meeting him has already made this project worthwhile.
Phil Kotler has authored over 90 books, including Marketing Management, which was my textbook when I studied marketing in school. To prep for this interview I watched his lectures on YouTube and read his autobiography, My Adventures in Marketing which is a lot of fun.
Phil Kotler’s career has spanned over six decades and his work has fundamentally shaped how we understand and practice marketing, so we cover a lot of territory in our 30 minutes together. Now here it is, my conversation with Dr. Philip Kotler.
Read the full transcript: Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.
Andrew Mitrak: Dr. Kotler, thanks for joining us!
Philip Kotler: Oh, thank you for inviting me. I'm always excited to talk about the history of marketing and where it's going.
The Emergence of the Word "Marketing"
Andrew Mitrak: I want to start at the beginning of where the word "marketing" originated. In one of your lectures, you give a fascinating illustration. You mentioned that if you looked in a Webster's dictionary, you wouldn't find the word "marketing," but then if you picked up a dictionary in 1910, you would find the word "marketing" in it. So I'm just curious what happened around the turn of the century with the emergence of "marketing?"
Philip Kotler: I would guess it wasn't used so much, maybe in conversation but not in print. Some people might say, "Hey, you're going to sell it or market it," I don't know, but there was no textbook on marketing. The first ones came around 1910. Why were they written? Well, because economists really wrote these new books called "marketing." They felt that economists didn't discuss enough of the factors that influence the level of demand. The main factor economists would talk about influencing demand was price: raise the price, less demand; lower the price, more demand. Well, these guys started to say, "But what about the whole advertising world? Doesn't that affect purchase rates? What about salespeople who knock on doors and show you new things and get your purchase order?" And then distribution, the whole system is quite complicated. So we needed a book, said economists, most of them were economists, that described things that economic theory didn't discuss or had no theory about, or fuzzy theories about. What is advertising and sales, and is that of any importance to mention when you're talking about macroeconomics or microeconomics? So that's how the book came about.
Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. So these economists, these are sort of pre-Keynesian era economists, pre-Austrian School, very early economics. And marketing sort of originated as an academic pursuit from economists. I'm curious about when professional marketers, when you see a marketing job title in a company, would that also occur at the same time or was that later?
Philip Kotler: Well, that was later too. Actually, marketing was not looked upon as an important function. They called it really "advertising." And there was a separate group that was running the sales force. The two big things were, somehow we've got to incorporate in our thinking at that time something to say about a whole industry called "advertising" and a whole industry called the "sales force." The early books described these two areas in familiar terms, in common sense terms, but without much research. In other words, you'd find in one of the early books on marketing, "Here are the five traits of a successful salesperson." Well, you couldn't argue against those, but there was no evidence, no empiricism applied to figuring out why did IBM have a superior sales force and someone else did, and so on. And the same with advertising, it was common sense ideas of what make ads work well, print ads of course, this was maybe before we got to radio ads and television ads.
Philip Kotler's Journey: From Economics to Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: We talk about marketing as a form of applied economics and marketing originating from economics, and you yourself got your Masters and your PhD both in economics. I'm wondering if you could talk about how you jumped from economics to marketing and, I guess more broadly, what that relationship between economics and marketing is.
Philip Kotler: Those are two good questions. My economics degree at the Master's level was from the University of Chicago. I was a student of Milton Friedman.
Andrew Mitrak: Wow.
Philip Kotler: Therefore, I was learning Friedman economics in the sense, which is free market, and not only free market economics, but where the government is the problem, not the economy. But then, nothing about marketing. Then I moved for my PhD to MIT, and Professor Samuelson, Paul Samuelson, is the leader and he's a Keynesian economist. He believes that the government plays an important role, especially in recessions and depressions, of learning how to pump in more money so consumers will have more to spend and businesses could pick up on that demand. Now, that meant, how will consumers use the money that they're going to get? I got interested in the marketing question of how consumers use their money and how companies try to get consumers to use the money to buy the things that the companies are making. So marketing strategy became very interesting to me. And when I was hired at Northwestern University, the dean there said, "Do you want to teach economics or do you want to teach marketing?" But he made a statement, he says, "You know, economics is a pretty settled field. It's hard to become Paul Samuelson or Milton Freedman again. Marketing is ready for development." He was right. I was tempted to and see, more curious about the everyday world of people buying goods and services and companies trying to sell those goods and services.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that's actually probably some broader career advice of looking at what's the emerging category and the frontier versus what's been more saturated and played out. I'm curious, beyond academia, your first encounters with marketing just as a young person. Were there advertisements that you encountered that you felt were specifically memorable or campaigns, or just as a consumer, what were your interactions or observations about marketing at the time?
Philip Kotler: I was very interested in advertising campaigns and whether they were a good use of the money of the company to get more demand coming about. For example, I would watch the Coca-Cola campaign, and I would say to myself, "Something's strange because there's no information that's new in the campaign." Everyone knows what Coke is, many people love it. So what's its purpose? Why tell us nothing? Well, they, that's not really what happened. It was showing the consumers in a happy state. It was an emotional response that was being, not a cognitive response. But the aim of the campaign was going to be to get people to feel happier connected with drinking Coke. But I wasn't just interested in advertising. I became interested in the whole idea of how to manage the marketing function in the company. Because frankly, the marketing function did not, was not in on the inner circle of the company. There's always the head of finance, we call the Chief Financial Officer, and their chief and product managers and all that. Marketing was there to help after all the other decisions were made. I'll give you an illustration. Often, the company has developed an innovation without any marketing people being part of the development of the innovation. And then when it was ready and tested in some ways, they call on the marketing people, "It's your turn to advertise it." Marketing people say, "Well, why did you price it that high? What was, who's the target market exactly? And why didn't you add these features? How did you even know that this was the best offer you could make?" So I was impressed with the companies that failed to include market-oriented thinking and customer-oriented thinking in making new products.
Figures who Influenced Marketing: Peter Drucker, Dale Carnegie, Ralph Nader, Abraham Maslow
Andrew Mitrak: Who are some of the leaders that most influenced you or who are the most influential people in the field of marketing that preceded your expertise in marketing?
Philip Kotler: Peter Drucker was not only the father of management, but he had a great appreciation of marketing in his voluminous writings. He was the one who said, "The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary." Because if you knew a lot about a customer, you will know that whether that person is going to even care about what you make. And if you know he will or she will care about it a lot, you have a right away to make it available and expose to them that they would get excited and they'd stand in line to buy it. In other words, his idea was to come out with a product that makes people just join the line to buy it as soon as possible. And we've seen products like that. Peter Drucker, here were some of his statements, and he's writing about management, but he loved marketing too. One of his statements, "The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation." Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are costs. Now, that was a put out to the people in production, people in finance, and so on. But if so, a company that is not good at marketing and innovation will slow down and die eventually. He says, "The purpose of a company is to create customers, not to make products." You know, in the old days, we say, "That's a car company, they make cars," right? No, they make customers for cars.
Andrew Mitrak: Okay, just want to pause on that. That's such a flip where I feel like sometimes today, marketing is seen as a cost center or the a cost of doing business and this is so contrary to that. And this is coming from somebody who is really an expert in business management stating this. So it is, it is just surprising to hear that it's so contrarian to sometimes what's the perception of marketing today.
Philip Kotler: Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: In one of your talks as well, I saw you describing characters who influenced marketing and you mentioned Dale Carnegie, of course, from How to Win Friends and Influence People, the famous book.
Philip Kotler: Of course, the idea of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People was a testament about the kind of behavior someone who's selling something should have toward the buyer. It wasn't a book about applying high pressure or hard selling. It was soft selling, soft, engaging. It was valuing the consumer and the purpose, and probing what actually is operating in his or her mind. So that was good work. There were other people. You know, we had attacks on marketing too. We had people who said, "Our cars are unsafe." General Motors is making unsafe cars.
Andrew Mitrak: Ralph Nader.
Philip Kotler: Then we had Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, saying that even when you're in a theater, you may have to get up and get the popcorn because the movies have behind them a little thing that is suggesting that you're having a hunger for some popcorn. Never proven, of course, but the Hidden Persuaders, right? So, you know, I always said marketers deserve criticism and need to figure out how to respond.
Andrew Mitrak: What did the curriculum for marketing look like as you were becoming a student and a, and then a professor of marketing?
Philip Kotler: We found out that as a faculty member of a very good marketing group at Northwestern University, we divided our skill set into those marketing teachers who were going to be very quantitative, use methods of cluster analysis, regression analysis, sophisticated things, and those who were behaviorally oriented. They were going to get deeply into motivations of consumers and benefit formulations.
Brand building became very much, some people thought that the point was reached where maybe the field should be called "branding" rather than "marketing." But I argued against that because while branding is the most important, one of the most important things about marketing, the work, marketing is more about what products should we be making, and who do we want to go after. The brand comes up as part answers, but it's not a full enough question. Marketing is a holistic area. Now, I had a lot of influence from a fellow named John Howard, who didn't have much public presence, but he wrote wonderful stuff. He really took, helped create a framework for thinking about marketing.
But of course, the main framework that came about was what Jerome McCarthy did, the 4 P's thing. A little story about that. McCarthy went to Northwestern University for his training and took the class of Dick Clewett, who was a very good marketer and Clewett always talked about the three P's and the 1 D. He said, "Marketing is about product, price, and place, and distribution."
What is, what was Jerome's, what was Jerome's contribution? Instead of using the word "distribution," he used the word "promotion" instead. And so, product, price, place, and promotion, those were the four P's. Now, that's called the "marketing mix." Do you realize that historically there was a man named Neil Borden at Harvard who, in the maybe '40s, had a marketing mix of 12 tools that marketers can use? Interest, the interest rate is a tool. If you lower interest, more people will buy homes and all that. Great. Well, things, and so the interesting thing is that we went to four P's. Clewett was the inspiration that gave it to our friend who did it. But the interesting thing is strategy, well absolutely. Actually, those tools are tactics. Strategy is above that. Marketing mix elements are the tactics of marketing, but they have to be informed by a strategy that has figured out a need that isn't being met.
Andrew Mitrak: I want to talk about Marketing Management, which is the most widely used textbook today for marketers. And in your autobiography, you mentioned that as you were writing this, you weren't happy with any of the existing marketing textbooks. And this was partially what inspired you to write the first edition of Marketing Management. I suppose what was missing from these marketing textbooks at the time, and what did you want to do differently?
Philip Kotler: I wanted to have more theory about how can consumers actually behave. What we had, simple theories of people having needs. In fact, we had that famous one where there's needs going all the way from just to exist, your hunger being satisfied. But what is that triangle called?
Andrew Mitrak: Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Philip Kotler: Yeah, so that scheme was there, but the behavior of sciences were growing and getting more sophisticated. We began to know much more about how the consumer side. So, all right, I felt Marketing Management offers a more comprehensive theory of consumer behavior and a more comprehensive theory of company behavior, management behavior, than we had really seen. I did a lot of work about strategy, differentiating between tactical marketing and strategic marketing. I also thought that some of the sophisticated tools for measuring demand and forecasting demand that I learned in the one-year Harvard program have to get explained to the students through the professor's learning roughly more about market segmentation theory. And then I quoted something, I think I developed it myself, STP. That marketing is about segmentation, targeting, and positioning.
Andrew Mitrak: I didn't realize that segmentation, targeting, positioning was something that you coined or came up with and popularized in your books. It's something that I come back to over and over. Do you recall the stroke of insight that led you to come up with that?
Philip Kotler: Well, it has to do with segmentation, which I was not the inventor of, the idea of doing more segmentation. I'm trying to remember the professor who wrote the most interesting article on it. But once you get into knowing there's even mathematics for segmentation, for optimizing on segmentation, that you now have segments, but you can't sell to all the segments. So targeting, figuring out the ones for whom you have the best product, and then communicating that it's the best for them is called positioning. Now, if that doesn't lead to branding, I don't know what does. So STP is the tool set for getting to build a strong brand.
Andrew Mitrak: Just coming back to Marketing Management, which is now in its 16th edition, I'm just curious about how it was first received. What was the initial reception of it like?
Philip Kotler: Well, I was delighted with the response, and I figured out the answer to why it was successful. It was successful because the marketing group always felt inferior to the finance group in a company. Marketing was common sense, but finance was science, right? Along comes a book, my 1967 book, that says marketing also has science to it. In other words, my book gave prestige to marketing. It gave a vocabulary and a mental framework where marketers are saying that they can add a lot of value. There was a whole group that thought marketing should stay centered on commercial activities, and I and Sid Levy, my colleague, said, "No, marketing is much broader than that because, first of all, you have the nonprofit organizations, and they're marketing a cause."
Social Marketing: Applying Marketing to Social Causes
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, well this kind of leads into social marketing in a way. You mentioned your colleague, Sid Levy, and you published a 1969 article entitled "Broadening the Concept of Marketing," and then in '71, you published an article in which you coined the term "social marketing." What inspired you to look at broadening marketing, and what inspired you to help create social marketing as a field?
Philip Kotler: The broadening, I mentioned, is coming about because we found out that all organizations want to use some advertising, and they have a pricing problem, and so on. But as far as social marketing, it came about because of cigarettes. We were all upset about how many people smoke and want to stop smoking. Can marketing help them stop smoking or smoke less? Yes, what we could do is the four P's: make the product taste poor or find a cigarette that is at least less harmful since they still want to smoke, or make it harder to find where you can buy cigarettes. Don't put them right in the front of the retail situation, put it in the closet. And then the guy selling to you has to go into the closet and get your Marlboro package or something. And then raise the price of cigarettes, so it's harder to smoke five a day at that price. And then do a promotion that makes it look ugly to be a smoker, that you're, show how your health, you're coughing all the time now, and so on. So the four P's work beautifully on that. Today, they're not working for companies to sell more product, but they are there to use a set of tools to help people get off of something that they themselves don't want to be on.
Pushback Against Broadening the Concept of Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: Oh, wow. I want to come back to this idea of broadening the concept of marketing. From what I understand, there was maybe even some pushback of people saying, "Hey, we want marketing to be more of a narrow field focused on products and services," while clearly, marketing is much broader than that. I'm curious what the first reception to this idea was.
Philip Kotler: Well, I think people were hostile, but I would say that there was a group that wanted to stay with commercial business only. And we took a vote. We asked the AMA, American Marketing Association, to run a vote on this question of, "Do you, as a professor and member of the AMA, feel we should not stray from commercial marketing or that we should also allow that to happen?"
And the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of broadening marketing. That's the best way to settle something is to just take a vote.
Marketing may undergo another revolution. I'm waiting for it to happen. I want to be in on it too.
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about your six decades or more into a career in marketing, that you're continuously researching the cutting edge. Any tips or what's your secret to doing this?
Philip Kotler: Well, some of it must be genes. Everyone has a set of genes. I was lucky to have good health. I've always been interested in learning everything there is to learn in the world. I've had an Aristotelian appetite because Aristotle, in my mind, knew everything at that time. He wrote on poetics, he wrote on drama, he wrote on science, and so on. But different people come along, and some stay with one passion and do so well, and they move the whole area upward. But I've been interested in broad questions and what's happening in the world as well as what's happening in business at large.
The Marketing Lessons of Dale Chihuly and Studio Art Glass
Andrew Mitrak: And as far as your interest in a breadth and a wide range of topics, I know one of your interests is collecting contemporary studio art glass. I'm on this call from Seattle, and Dale Chihuly is a local icon. Just a fun question, I'm curious if there are any marketing lessons we could draw from the life and work and brand of Dale Chihuly?
Philip Kotler: Dale Chihuly put glass in the minds of everyone by not making more of the same. He was selling whatever he made of the same, but he wasn't going to stay making the same. He wanted to see how far you could push glass into being more than it is. So we go to a garden, and we see glass flowers growing. Or we look at a ceiling, and the ceiling is a piece of glass plane, but behind it are all kinds of beautiful things. This is in Las Vegas. Sometimes you're walking on a floor, and underneath it, there are some beautiful objects. There are many great glassmakers now, but he was the one who started it all.
And there's nothing quite like it. It's so vibrant and colorful, and it seems distinctive and highly imitated but never as good.
Andrew Mitrak: Dr. Kotler, thanks so much for your time. Are there any things that you'd like to promote or that listeners can look up, anything you'd like to plug?
Philip Kotler: Well, Andrew, I thank you. I'm coming out with a few new books because I get excited about other areas. For one, for example, has to do with small and medium-sized firms. Whenever I and others try to teach marketing, we always use Coca-Cola and McDonald's and big companies. So small companies are sitting in the audience and saying, "Yeah, but I'm a small company, can I use that? Do I have the amount of money that a big company, I don't have that amount of money." And we always get off of it by saying, "Oh, everything we said you could use in your business, however, whatever size it is." But the truth is that we don't have any book on marketing for small and medium-sized enterprises, for family businesses. We have some books, but they don't seem to, there isn't a standard yet for that. So one of the books we're coming out with will be on marketing for small and medium-sized businesses. And once we have the title start with family businesses because managing in the small, you see all the issues pop up.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh, gosh, and I am looking forward to that one. That's a personal passion area of mine. I look forward to reading that.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Kotler, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has just been a wonderful conversation.
Philip Kotler: Thank you for starting your interest in the history of marketing because there's so much that we do know, but so much we still don't know. And absolutely, your explorations will be watched, I hope, very much by many, many people. And I want the professors to broadly know about the work you're going to prepare for their use in classrooms too.
Andrew Mitrak: Thanks so much.
Philip Kotler: So do successful marketing of your work.
*****
Recent Books Authored By Philip Kotler:
Philip Kotler and V. Kumar, Transformative Marketing, Macmillan, 2024.
Philip Kotler, Waldermar Pfoertsch, Fabio Guido Ulderico Ancorani, and Ivan Ureta Vanquero, Humanism in Marketing – Responsible Leadership and the Human-to-Human Approach, Springer 2024
Philip Kotler, Hooi Den Huan, and Iwan Setiawan, Marketing 6.0. The Future is Immersive, Wiley, 2024.
Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya, and Jacky Mussry, Reimagining Operational Excellence: Inspirations from Asia, Wiley 2024.
Gabriele Carboni and Philip Kotler, Enlightened Management, Amazon, 2024.
Waldemar Pfoertsch and Philip Kotler, B2B Brand Marketing, 2nd edition, 2025. (coming soon)

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Introducing: A History of Marketing
13 jan· A History of Marketing
A podcast exploring the untold stories of how marketing evolved through conversations with marketing leaders, professors, authors, and historians - including Philip Kotler, David Aaker, Guy Kawasaki, Jagdish Sheth, V. Kumar, Shelley Spector, and more.
Hosted by Andrew Mitrak
marketinghistory.org
Transcript:
Imagine this. The year is 1900. You pick up a copy of the Webster’s English dictionary. You search for the word "marketing."
You don’t find it. That’s because it’s not there yet.
Flash forward to 2025 and you log in to LinkedIn. You search for "marketing." You’ll find more than 9 million marketers on the platform.
What happened? When did Marketing become a job people do every day?
Why is Marketing History Overlooked?
My name is Andrew Mitrak, and I’m one of those 9 million marketers. I've led marketing for a few startups. I founded and sold a marketing agency, and now I work as a marketer at one of the biggest companies on the planet.
But I have a confession to make.
I know shockingly little about the history of marketing. And my guess is I’m not alone.
Think about it. If you study economics, you learn about Adam Smith.
Study computer programming and you’ll hear about Ada Lovelace.
Physics? Isaac Newton.
Biology? Darwin.
In most disciplines you learn about the people, the theories, and the milestones that shape the field over time.
But not so much in marketing. When I was in school, we jumped straight to the strategies and tactics used today
But who were the pioneers? What were the big breakthroughs? And when did people start calling themselves thought leaders?
I have lots of questions. So I looked for answers.
First I looked for a book about the history of marketing. But I didn’t find what I was looking for.
There are books for academics, biographies of advertising professionals, and a lot of books about marketing strategy today, and marketing in the future, but there’s little about marketing’s past.
Phil Kotler: “The Father of Modern Marketing”
I started my adventure into marketing history and I emailed Dr. Philip Kotler.
Phil is a living legend. He literally wrote the book on marketing management.
Philip Kotler: Thank you for inviting me. I'm always excited to talk about the history of marketing and it where it's going.
Marketing was common sense, but finance was science.
Along comes my 1967 book that says marketing also has science to it.
My book gave prestige to marketing.
And after we talked, Phil introduced me to his colleagues.
Connecting with Marketing Legends
George Day: “I'm delighted to be able to share my story.”
Jagdish Sheth: “Having a different perspective became an asset for me.”
David Aaker: “The idea that brand is an asset, and there's brand equity and you can build it, changed everything.”
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with historians, biographers, museum founders, agency leaders, and former CEOs and CMOs. I’ve learned a bunch and felt super inspired.
V. Kumar: “Advertising has got three objectives: inform, persuade, and remind.”
Guy Kawasaki: “It is not about you. It is about them… You gotta work backward from the customer, not forward from what you want to do.”
Marketers are great storytellers. So these conversations are a lot of fun.
Larry Tye: “He was the most dazzling figure in the history of public relations.”
Shelley Spector: “It wasn't just PR that he did. I mean he was a part of history.”
Mark Tungate: “I was interested in advertising history, so I thought, ‘Maybe it's me that should do this.’"
And now, I want to share these conversations with you.
Introducing "A History of Marketing" Podcast
Introducing A History of Marketing, a podcast that explores the untold story of how marketing evolved.
Join me as we uncover the hidden history of the brands, the campaigns, and the brilliant minds that shaped the way we buy, sell, and market today.
Philip Kotler: “Marketing may undergo another revolution. I'm waiting for it to happen. I want to be in on it, too.”
Guy Kawasaki: “The very fact that I'm mentioned in a podcast with Philip Kotler with someone like Philip Kotler... I've arrived.”
Visit marketinghistory.org to get new episodes delivered right to your inbox, or subscribe to "A History of Marketing" wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org
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Avsnitt

Larry Tye on Edward Bernays: "The Father of Public Relations"

David Aaker: "The Father of Modern Branding"

Mark Tungate: Advertising History from Ancient Pompeii to Today

Guy Kawasaki: The Remarkable Rise of Evangelism Marketing

Dr. Philip Kotler: 'The Father of Modern Marketing'

Introducing: A History of Marketing