
Americans Thought They Smelled Fine Until Marketers Convinced Them Otherwise - ryan_j_naughton
http://priceonomics.com/americans-thought-they-smelled-fine-until/
======
rayiner
Probably more accurate title: Americans didn't realize they smelled bad until
marketers pointed out otherwise. If you've ever been to a part of the world
where deodorant use is less common, you know its not a marketing-manufactured
problem. The fact that people get used to it (like people get used to the
garbage smell in New York) doesn't mean it isn't a real problem.

~~~
drcube
It kind of does. No one is hurt by bad smells, and at the very worst, you have
to deal with a few unpleasant moments before your senses recalibrate, and then
you don't notice the odor anymore. And when everybody smells more or less the
same, nobody has to feel inferior.

Marketers basically invented a pretty pit for people to throw their money in,
and made them self conscious of their natural bodies in the process. It's had
an almost entirely negative influence on the world.

Garbage in New York is unsanitary, attracts pests, and causes disease. Human
body odor does not. They are not comparable.

~~~
sliverstorm
The "natural human body" wasn't meant to have clothes on, or spend all day
indoors in close quarters with other humans.

When you take humans out of their natural environment, can you really argue
that features of the human body are "natural" and thus in some way inviolable?

 _Garbage in New York... attracts pests. Human body odor does not._

Good to know. Flies must be attracted to something other than body odor &
sweat then. Perhaps... body heat?

~~~
dragonwriter
> The "natural human body" wasn't meant to have clothes on

Stop anthropomorphizing nature; it gets angry when you do that.

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm adopting the speech device for the sake of communicating effectively with
the people I am talking to, not because I believe nature "intended" this or
that.

------
orky56
Goes back further than this. Listerine "invented" halitosis.

According to Freakonomics:[3] Listerine, for instance, was invented in the
nineteenth century as powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in
distilled form, as both a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it
wasn't a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution
for "chronic halitosis"— a then obscure medical term for bad breath.
Listerine's new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage
but turned off by their mate's rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in
spite of that?" one maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath was not
conventionally considered such a catastrophe. But Listerine changed that. As
the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, "Listerine did not make
mouthwash as much as it made halitosis." In just seven years, the company's
revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.

from wikipedia:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listerine#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listerine#History)

------
VMG
It's not about inventing problems, it's about competitive advantage. If
everybody agreed that we didn't need to cut our hair, we would get used to it
also, but having a hairstyle simply looks better.

The same thing will happen with whitened teeth. The more people have it, the
more those that don't have it will stand out, until we all need to do it.

Welcome to the arms race that social life.

------
brymaster
Article he's talking about and previous HN discussion from a year ago:

How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355706)

------
gohrt
Americans didn't think they needed soda, laptop computers, brightly colored
clothing, air conditioning, cars, ...until marketers convinced them otherwise.

~~~
diminoten
Soda, laptops, clothes, air condition, and cars all solve problems that
existed before they did (maybe less so the colored clothing).

The article is about how the problem of smell was invented by the people who
held the solution.

~~~
jlgreco
What problem did soda solve?

My understanding is that sodas were mostly introduced as mostly phoney patent
medicines.. in other words they claimed to (but did not) solve problems that
we no longer use them to solve. They didn't actually solve anything and their
use today doesn't really have anything to do with solutions to any problem.

~~~
diminoten
The "what do I drink that'll taste better than water?" problem.

~~~
sliverstorm
Folks, remember your historical context. Before people drank soda, they mostly
drank beer (or other alcohol). Soda is the non-alcoholic replacement.

There's still echoes of this left in modern-day asian culture. Particularly
authentic asian restaurants will still look at you funny if you ask for iced
water with your meal. Traditionally, it's either hot tea or hot sake.

~~~
ValentineC
> Before people drank soda, they mostly drank beer (or other alcohol). Soda is
> the non-alcoholic replacement.

Didn't people historically drink alcoholic beverages because of alcohol's
antiseptic properties? (Oddly enough, I can't find much reference to this
hypothesis in Wikipedia.)

Soda appears to fulfill the need for cold, sugary, flavoured drinks.

~~~
sliverstorm
Not always. Beer back then was usually too weak to kill bacteria, but the
brewing process involves boiling, and we now know what that does to bacteria!
But yes, generally speaking alcoholic beverages were safer than water.

I'm not saying that soda took the job of "drink that is safer than water". I'm
merely pointing out that people did not migrate from water to soda. They went
from beer to soda.

------
ianstallings
I don't wear it just to smell good, I wear modern _anti-perspirant_ because
I'd rather not have sweat stains when I arrive at work if possible. So
marketers, thank you. You've made my life better.

------
jrochkind1
I'm not sure I agree with the implication that the 'positive' campaign of
Febreeze was somehow more ethical or polite than the 'negative' one for
deodorant --

\-- both of them convinced masses of people that they needed a consumer
product that nobody previously thought they had any need for.

There are ethics-of-marketting implications there worth discussing, but the OP
doesn't really get into them, and they don't differ depending on whether you
'go negative or positive', these were really both essentially the same 'path
to success'.

------
gamache
In my experience, when someone reeks, it's usually because they don't bathe
daily or they don't wash their clothes enough.

Fresh sweat on a recently showered body generally does not smell bad. A guy
who applies Right Guard for three days instead of showering does. (Deodorant
is odorant anyway.)

------
WalterSear
Well, someone had to tell them.

------
malandrew
This same type of thing happened with oral herpes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_cul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_culture)

