Torches of Freedom
The story of the origin of PR
Recently I read about the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to investing and how merely a finance or an economics background doesn’t guarantee that you will do well in your investing journey. So I decided it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to start reading about and hence writing about stuff which is not necessarily related to the market or personal finance.
A couple of days ago my friends and I decided to meet at a friend’s place and work from there. If y’all haven’t tried it yet, I’d highly recommend it. It’s not only an escape from your mundane working days, but it also gives you an opportunity to know more about the kind of work your friends are into. One of my friends works for a PR firm and during our breaks when we were discussing about our job profiles, it reminded me of a story of how exactly the term Public Relations was coined. We discussed it and turns out she didn’t know about this and she was super intrigued. So tonight, since I am not swamped with work(after ages!, I want to share this story of a brilliant man named Edward Bernays.
Eddie Bernays, who was working as a press agent in America, was asked to accompany President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace conference after the First World War ended. Bernays noticed the reception of the President in Paris and was astounded to see the crowd. Wilson was portrayed as a liberator of the people, he was their hero. He was portrayed as a man who had created a new world in which the individual would be free. Bernays was fascinated by how propaganda can be used to influence the behavior of people. He began to wonder whether it would be possible to do the same type of mass persuasion at times of peace.
An interesting fact about Bernays- he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud- the founder of psychoanalysis. When he came back to New York, he set up as Public Relations counsel. He coined the term “Public Relations” because he thought the term “propaganda” was a negative word used by the Germans. Bernays had read his uncle’s book on psychoanalysis and the picture of hidden irrational forces inside human beings fascinated him.
When a cigarette manufacturer came to him with a problem that he was losing half his market due to a taboo against women smoking, Eddie consulted a psychoanalyst called Dr. Brill, one of the first and leading psychoanalysts in America. He told Bernays that cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power. He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, then women would also smoke because then “women would have their own penises.”
In New York, every year an Easter Day Parade was arranged where thousands of people came. Bernays decided to stage an event there. He persuaded a group of rich debutantes to hide cigarettes under their clothes and join the parade. Then as he would give a signal, they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically. He then informed the press that he had heard that a group of suffragettes (a female supporter of women’s right to vote in the early 20th century) were preparing to protest by lighting up what they called “Torches of Freedom”.
So here you have a symbol- young debutantes smoking in public-with a phrase that meant anybody who believed in this kind of equality had to support them in the ensuing debate about this. If you think about it, it made perfect sense to use this term because the Statue of Liberty is also holding up a torch! So you not only have emotion and memory but also a rational phrase to connect it with. From that point, the sales of cigarettes to women began to rise and Bernays made it socially acceptable for women to smoke with a simple symbolic act.
The idea that smoking actually made women freer was absolutely irrational but it made them feel more independent. This meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.
Today, the idea that people aren’t just purchasing something, they are engaging themselves with it emotionally is pretty common. But it was originated by a press agent, who got inspired by the book written by his neurologist uncle and used his ideas of psychoanalysis to generate massive sales for a business. Talk about a multidisciplinary approach!
