“A woman’s arm! Poets have sung of it, great artists have painted its beauty. It should be the daintiest, sweetest thing in the world. And yet, unfortunately, it isn’t always.”
After James Webb Young wrote those lines in 1919, women in his social circle stopped talking to him.
Even his female copywriter colleagues gave him dirty looks.
Young was working for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. His task was to promote the first-ever antiperspirant, Odorono.
Young’s first crack at this account was a fairly standard ad. It attacked the popular belief that an antiperspirant is dangerous stuff.
Sales limped upwards, and then flattened.
A subsequent door-to-door survey revealed that women knew about Odorono. But only one third used it. Two thirds believed they didn’t need it.
So Young wrote another ad. The headline read, “Within The Curve of a Woman’s Arm.”
It was this ad that got him those dirty looks.
It also made Young’s career… it doubled sales of Odororno (which eventually became a million-dollar company, back in 1920s money)… and it made millions of women newly self-conscious.
The point of all this is the power of tying in what you’re selling to people’s insecurities.
Genuine insecurities.
Because today it’s enough to say, “Bad BO?”
But back in 1920, you couldn’t do that. Women smell-tested themselves. They smelled fine.
That’s why Young had to create a problem. He took the idea of perspiration… and he tied it to being undesirable — and clueless about it.
Devious? Yes.
Cynical? Absolutely.
Profitable? Like a mother.
And something to keep in mind, if you too are in the business of opening new markets.
(By the way, in case you think this is another example of horrible double standards for women… Men got their own deodorant, starting in 1935. Before then, man-musk was considered a good thing. So how did advertisers sell the American man on demusking himself? They did the same damn thing. They tied it to the possibility of stinking up the office… and the emasculation of being fired.)
One final point:
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