What industry did SOAP launch?

My friend Craig Winters at Citizens for Health does some great work talking about natural foods/supplements and our need to push for us to keep them free from government and commercial influence.

In a recent story, he did some great bacgkround work on how the soap business launched advertising as an agent of serious social change. Since none of us were around then, it is an educational review!

"Beginning with the American Revolution, and continuing with the westward move across the continent, the American spirit was fiercely independent and self-reliant.

An especially simple example was that family soap was made and used almost exclusively at home through most of the 1800's. In a sense, soap-making was one of the simplest forms of autonomous health care.

Advertising changed this. Few people know that the soap business was one of the first industries to use large-scale advertising beginning in the late 1800's. Soap manufacturers set out to mold the American experience so that consumers needed to buy - not make their own - soap. They built an advertising strategy centered on the connection between physical health and spiritual wellness, with an embedded message that only industrially-produced pure soap could provide that connection.

For instance, one early advertisement featured cherubs bathing with a large bar of soap. Another included a testimonial from the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in 1870: "If cleanliness is next to Godliness, then surely soap is a means of grace." [Lears, Jackson, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, Pantheon Books, 1981]

The rest is history. Now, we're not suggesting that we return to the days of making our own soap as a way of escaping the advertising matrix. Yet, this story shows how advertising deeply penetrated one of the simplest forms of personal health care and transformed it forever. It also reveals that the fundamental goal of advertisers is not just to sell a product. It's to create a need, to establish that commerce holds the expertise to meet that need, and to maintain consumer dependence on that expertise.

This is Advertising 101. In fact, next time you're watching t.v. or flipping through a magazine, keep an eye out for health care ads - drugs ads especially. The basic method hasn't changed much. Instead of cherubs washing, you're apt to see people waltzing through pristine fields. It's just another way of connecting physical health to inner wellbeing."

So your quick takeaway for today is:

You know your product or service brings value to the marketplace, or else you wouldn't be doing it. But what does your branding, and the way you do business, connect your customer with?