It was 1928, and George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company (ATC), had a challenge on his hands. Tobacco companies had long targeted women, but due to the social taboo against women smoking in public, none had succeeded at breaking the market.
In an effort to target women—albeit, from a fresh angle—Washington sought the help of Edward Bernays, a self-styled “public relationships counsel,” to help him recruit women to smoke.
Bernays realized, however, that if he were to succeed, he would need to do more than “convince” women to smoke; that desire already existed (women had been smoking in private for decades). Instead, he needed to create a shift in how the public perceived female smokers.
Author Shane Parrish recounts Bernay’s approach:
Bernays didn’t focus on how to sell more cigarettes to women within the existing social structure…. Instead, he thought about what the world would like if women smoked often and everywhere, and then set about trying to make that world a reality. [1]
To do that, Bernays linked smoking to a number of aspirations, including, most famously, freedom, such that on one occasion, he hired women to march in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York and smoke their “torches of freedom” as a symbol or equality. [2]
In 1929, women only purchased 5 percent of cigarettes sold. By 1965, due, in part, to the success of Bernays’ campaign, coupled with the rise of first-wave feminism (which some argue, Bernay exploited to further his cause), that number had risen to 33.3 percent. [3]
While Bernay’s relied on several marketing principles—chief among them, Eugene Schwartz’s idea of channeling and directing desire rather than creating it—he also utilized a useful mental model available to all of us: inversion.
To invert is to think about a problem from an inverse perspective. Instead of investing to make more money, invest with the goal of not losing money. Instead of eating more healthily to lose weight, avoid unhealthy options. [4]
You might not be trying to change a nation’s consumption habits, as Bernays was, but you are likely trying to solve a problem, be it at home or work. To reveal hidden strategies you might not have considered, use inversion.
Footnotes
[1] I want to acknowledge Shane Parris for introducing me to Edward Bernays in his book, The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts.
[2] Smoke: A Global History of Smoking edited by Sander L. Gilman and Xun Zhou.
[4] Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann.
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