BERNAYS: AN HISTORICAL FIGURE IN PR

PR is..."Telling the truth in the best possible light." - BERNAYS

Edward Bernays is an extremely influential figure in public relations, although it is arguable that he was a publicist more so than a PR practitioner. Therefore it is one’s own interpretation as to whether he is ‘The Father of Public Relations’.  Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalytical psychologist who specialised in the unconscious mind. Bernays decided to combine the ideas of crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Freud.

At the time when Edward Bernays first began combining these ideas America had just come out of the war and the public were concerned with what they needed rather than what they wanted. He began turning America into the consumer culture it is now by making people want material objects.

One of his most famous campaigns was the Lucky Strikes promotion in the 1920’s. It was a huge social taboo for ladies to smoke in public, or even smoke at all to the extent that women could be arrested for smoking in undesignated areas. Consequently the cigarette market was limited to only half of the population as a potential consumer. Even though the amount of women that smoked had increased after the war, only 12% of females smoked. Therefore, in 1928 Lucky Strikes approached Bernays to open up their market to females to increase their profit margin.

Bernays recognised that women were still relishing the suffrage movement; therefore, Bernays decided to use this as a basis for his campaign. From a psychoanalytical view, it has been said that cigarettes were seen as a symbol of male phallic empowerment and sexual power at the time, thus representing an opportunity of equality to men, to women. During the 1929 Easter Parade, in New York, Bernays persuaded a group of rich debutantes to join the parade and take out cigarettes, at a signal from him. They then pulled out a lighter and began smoking them in an attention-grabbing way to provide a dramatic and eye-catching display. This therefore represented a motion of protest for complete equality to men: “Torches of Freedom”. Women across the US began smoking as a sign of protest and sales increased massively.

This example shows how Edward Bernays doubled the market of Lucky Strikes by identifying the issue, finding a way to address the publics that were previously not targeted and using s public relations stunt to get the message out there that it was okay for women to smoke if they wanted to. However the reasons for this particular promotion at the time were not so moral and Bernays has said that promoting smoking to women was one part of his career that he did regret.