As a matter of fact, the company’s ability to create its iconic products in the early to mid-twentieth century resulted from its early emphasis on R&D and marketing, dating back to its early paper business. Though most reviewers focused on the book as a company history, the most interesting aspect is showing K-C as a pioneer in integrated communications.

K-C had a series of intuitive marketers that championed the company’s initiatives, thus making it difficult to label one as a marketing guru. Hopefully, some enterprising scholar will dig further into the marketers at companies like K-C, Scott Paper, and others to ferret out some of these “unknowns.”

I simply cannot agree. The Soviets mastered marketing and packaging in the modern form (nothing worthwhile inside, perhaps) before you were born. Their adoption of modern marketing techniques at many levels was copied by the US advertising and marketing industry because it was pure genius. Of course, in the West there was a better correlation between form and content.

What both Toni and you miss is that marketing evolved as capitalism developed (and as other systems developed). You are both wasting your time looking for “the” guru or “the” moment in time in all began. Certainly, one can trace its development back to the 19 century and one can only be amazed at how modern some of their techniques were.

Moreover, Bernays was not that significant to the development of marketing or to the theory of marketing. Toni, I fear you are a victim of Bernays’s self-publicity.

He challenged popular perceptions. He described how Henry Ford’s brilliance had little to do with mass production and production lines – they were a means to end – but everything to do with customer focus and delivering a product customers could afford and wanted; even if it had to be in black. He showed how production starts with customers – marketing – and then works backwards to the means to deliver what they need (solutions).

Henry Ford – using the logic of modern marketing – was up and at it big time without Bernays and before Bernays really got going in his professional life. Levitt also reveals the 19th century origins of marketing.

Levitt showed how effective capitalism is counterintuitive, particularly to those who claim – as does Naomi Klein on page one of NoLogo that it is all about production (her book is all downhill and wrong from that point on).

Bernays and Lippmann were not marketing men (though Bernays dabbled and much of his PR was marketing focused) they were into PR and propaganda (difficult to separate), and there is nothing wrong with that. Bernays was a great PR practitioner and a second-rate thinker. Lippmann was much much better when it comes to theory and original thinking.

What’s amazing about the Soviet contribution was how form was everything…but that’s another story.

Ted Levitt is a monument of marketing but came some 40 years after marketing practices, fostered by Bernays on the basis of Lippman’s and Freud’s studies, had well pervaded the entire western civilization.
So I stand by my previous indication.

Bernays writings were probably shallow (have you read Larry Tye’s biography of Bernays?) and he was certainly not lovable (he would not fit Jon White’s definition of ditsy which is from where this concoted discussion began..as Bill points out…). Yet, also according to the accounts of italian contemporary historian Ferdinando Fasce who was one the very first scholars to peruse all of Bernays papers before they were made public for his seminal ‘la democrazia degli affari’ carrocci editori 2002 (the democracy of business), his contribution to the creation of marketing whithin the world’s largest consumer goods company he consulted for well more than 40 years was very, very significant.

Ewen is very comfortable with our craft and he depicts exactly what the american model of public relations is all about, Bill. Sure it will remain in our dna forever and I don’t think this is bad, to the contrary it is very good if we can learn from our own mistakes as well as beneift from the many good things that model represented.

The only reproach (but it is only amild criticism..)for Ewen is that he did not give Bernays the credit of having fought for the regulation of the profession not on behalf of the practitioner’s interests but on behalf of the public interest.

Which leads me to the contradiction Paul seems to have found in my thoughts.

No, Paul, I have never claimed that the public interest is the interest of the public, but it is, as often stated even here in this blog, the mix between the existing normative environment and the interests represented by the active citizenship of a given society in a given time.

Sorry, no contradiction there.

There are of course many other in my thinking, which as you see is everything but fixed…but not in this case..I am afraid.

Question for Toni: if, as you say, there is no such thing as the public anymore is there such thing as the public interest? You cannot have it both ways. Following the logic of your own argument, if there is no public but only multiple publics, then the CPRS definition of what our trade is about must be nonsense.

The book is interesting but hardly definitive, and Ewen is in love with the theories of French social psychologist Gustave LeBon.

And the way Ewen limns the crackpot theories of Bernays would make you believe that the old fraud invented the modern practice of public relations—which he didn’t—and that his famous uncle Sigmund Freud’s assessment of Bernays (“He was an honest boy when I knew him. I do not know how much he has become Americanized.”) was an uninformed smackdown—which it wasn’t.

Moreover, Ewen doesn’t have much regard for practitioners of PR, whom he regards as masters of a black art based on manipulation of facts, half-truths, influence peddling and hype. He maligns Ivy Lee, whom he calls a “necromancer.” Harold Burson isn’t even mentioned, and the book completely overlooks Benjamin Sonnenberg, which is too bad, because Sonnenberg was one of the high priests of manipulation, half-truths, influence peddling and hype in the first half of the twentieth century.

But Sonnenberg also made one of the more notable advances in the development of the PR business. That is, he wouldn’t deal with anyone but the CEO. If a mere executive vice president called and tried to talk to him, he simply hung up. He also insisted on living better than his clients, (His biography is titled, “Always Live Better than Your Clients”). This attitude made his Gramercy Park townhouse one of the most active and prestigious salons of its time. He was a relationship builder before anyone even recognized what that meant, and profited handsomely from it.

There may be growing disdain for the so-called “American” model of PR, but it gave life to all the other little models, and it will be a very long time before they work that DNA out of their systems.

The Soviets had access to the best intellectuals, artists and designers in the world and they had a problem – how to market a revolution that was not working. Here’s a good account from a University of Georgia academic:

https://commerce.metapress.com/content/38t2589020208577/resource-secured/?target=fulltext.pdf&sid=55sun3a0vhfpmjmujeyydsv2&sh=www.springerlink.com

My 20th century marketing super hero was Theodore Levitt. He was German and worked at Havard. His thoughts were really heavyweight. Moreover, he showed me that modern marketing began in the 19th century.

If anybody wants to pay me I could lecture on this stuff. Let me know.