OP-ED: Marketing Reveals Society's Deepest Insecurities — From Cigarettes to Band-Aids

Look closely at what an industry had to invent fear or shame around in order to sell its product, and you'll see exactly what that era was insecure about. Two case studies, a century apart, make the pattern hard to miss.

Cigarettes and the Invention of a Body-Image Problem

In the late 1920s, American Tobacco Company ran a campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes telling women to "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" — selling cigarettes not as a product women might simply enjoy, but as a tool for suppressing appetite and staying thin, according to Stanford's Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising archive. The campaign didn't invent an insecurity society didn't already have about women's weight. It identified one that already existed and attached a product to it, at scale, for profit, with lasting public health consequences.

Band-Aid and the Normalization of Hiding a Minor Injury

Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages were invented in 1920 by Earle Dickson, a Johnson & Johnson employee, after his wife Josephine kept cutting and burning herself in the kitchen and needed a bandage she could apply herself, according to Johnson & Johnson's own company history. The product itself solved a real, practical problem. But decades of marketing around it — "flesh-toned" bandages that matched only the lightest skin tones, for example — reveal a different insecurity: the pressure to make an injury invisible rather than simply treated, and whose skin got to count as the default.

The Pattern, Not Just the Products

Neither example is really about cigarettes or bandages. Both are about what an industry learned it could sell by locating a real insecurity — about appearance, about visibility, about fitting in — and building a message around it instead of around the product's actual function. That's a repeatable playbook, and it still runs today, in categories far beyond either of these.

What This Means for How Neighborhood Businesses Market

It would be easy to read this history and conclude that manufacturing insecurity is simply how marketing works. We don't think that's true, and we don't advise it. A neighborhood business succeeds by speaking honestly to a real need a customer already has, not by inventing a new form of shame to attach a product to. That distinction is small in a sentence and large in practice, and it's the one we hold clients to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is all marketing manipulative, then?

No. Marketing that names a real problem and offers a real solution is simply communication. The manipulation starts when a message manufactures a problem, or a shame, that wasn't there before the ad ran.

How can a small business tell the difference in its own marketing?

A useful test: would the message still work if it described the customer's actual situation honestly, without exaggeration? If the message only works by making someone feel worse about themselves first, it's worth rewriting.

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The Local Mogul is King's Dream Business Consulting's blog, covering the people and small businesses building our local economies.