PR and Old Sigi Freud
Have you ever felt manipulated, pressured to do something, buy something, vote for someone or something? Have you ever done something on an impulse, and then later wondered why? What probably motivated you has been called “persuasive communication,” but today the term is PR, public relations, and guess who’s to blame: Sigi Freud!
Not that he got directly involved; he remained aloof, the distinguished pioneer in the study of the subconscious mind. It was his Americanized nephew, Edward L. Bernays, who adopted Uncle Sigi’s ideas. Bernays has been hailed … or vilified … as “the father of public relations.”
An example of his handiwork: In the 1920s he had Lucky Strike cigarettes as a client. Their problem: women didn’t smoke. So Bernays went to work, He launched a nationwide survey: “What is your favorite color?” Women answered “green,” the color of nature and money.
So Bernays hired hundreds of beautiful women, all dressed in green and smoking cigarettes, to parade through Paris, London, Milan, and New York. The result: all over the world women began smoking.
And what did he call cigarettes? Torches of freedom. Liberated from Victorian mores, women supposedly showed their independence by smoking — an idea that Big Tobacco would push to the limit.
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” announced the 1970s ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes, made by Philip Morris and marketed specifically to women; I remember them distinctly.
So there you have it: torches of freedom, which some today have rechristened “cancer sticks.” And it’s all thanks, via his nephew, to Uncle Sigi Freud. Who, by the way, was a smoker.
PR was welcomed and used not only by merchandisers, but also by authoritarian movements and regimes determined to tame and control the moods and actions of the mobs of people empowered by democracy.
For that, too, thank you Uncle Sigi, via your brilliant nephew, Mr. Barclays, whom Life magazine once hailed as one of the one hundred most influential Americans of the twentieth century.
Source note: This post was inspired by Bruce Poli’s article, “Sigmund Freud and the Birth of Public Relations,” in the October 2021 issue of WestView News, the monthly local newspaper serving New Yotk’s West Village. Much of its information comes from that source.
© 2021 Clifford Browder
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