Chapter 8
The Feelings Economy
In the 1920s, women didn’t smoke—or, if they did, they were severely judged
for it. It was taboo. Like graduating from college or getting elected to
Congress, smoking, people believed back then, should be left to the men.
“Honey, you might hurt yourself. Or worse, you might burn your beautiful
hair.”
This posed a problem for the tobacco industry. Here you had 50 percent of
the population not smoking their cigarettes for no other reason than it was
unfashionable or seen as impolite. This wouldn’t do. As George Washington
Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, said at the time, “It’s a
gold mine right in our front yard.” The industry tried multiple times to market
cigarettes to women, but nothing ever seemed to work. The cultural prejudice
against it was simply too ingrained, too deep.
Then, in 1928, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, a
young hotshot marketer with wild ideas and even wilder marketing
campaigns.^1 Bernays’s marketing tactics at the time were unlike anybody
else’s in the advertising industry.
Back in the early nineteenth century, marketing was seen simply as a
means of communicating the tangible, real benefits of a product in the
simplest and most concise form possible. It was believed at the time that
people bought products based on facts and information. If someone wanted to
buy cheese, then you had to communicate to them the facts of why your
cheese was superior (“Freshest French goat milk, cured twelve days, shipped
refrigerated!”). People were seen as rational actors making rational
purchasing decisions for themselves. It was the Classic Assumption: the
Thinking Brain was in charge.
But Bernays was unconventional. He didn’t believe that people made
rational decisions most of the time. He believed the opposite. He believed that
people were emotional and impulsive and just hid it really well. He believed
the Feeling Brain was in charge and nobody had quite realized it.
Whereas the tobacco industry had been focused on persuading individual