Half the Market Was Walking Away

Torches of Freedom, Part 3 of 9. We have the man. Now meet the client, the problem, and why a taboo became a line item. — Kiler Davenport

Picture the boardroom. You've been in some version of that room, haven't you? The one where somebody puts a number on a slide and the whole mood shifts.

The man at the head of the table was George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company. Lucky Strike was his obsession, and he'd built it into a bestseller by selling to men. But the math haunted him. Women were roughly half the country, and in the 1920s a woman smoking in public was still scandal. In 1922, a woman was actually arrested for lighting up on a New York street.

Look at that from his chair. That isn't a social injustice. That's lost revenue. A real, enforced, expensive taboo, sitting between his product and half his customers.

Hill brought Bernays on in 1928 with a one-line brief: get women smoking. A slimming angle was already in play, the "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" pitch aimed straight at women's anxieties about their figures. It moved sales, but slowly. Hill didn't want an increment. He wanted a revolution.

Here's the hard truth about this scene: nobody in that room was asking whether women should smoke, or what it would do to them. The question on the table was how to get past the resistance. A real injustice and a business opportunity were sitting in the same spot, and only one of them was getting a meeting.

So Bernays did what he always did. He stopped thinking about the product and started thinking about its meaning. And he made a phone call to a psychoanalyst.

Part 4: what that psychoanalyst told him, and the single idea that changed everything.

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