Enjoy Bacon? Of Course You Do!

Here’s why. You didn’t have a chance.

The original Father of Spin, Edward Bernays, who together with fellow publicist Ivy Lee, is credited with founding the profession we recognize today as public relations. Looking back, the ethical morality of many of his wins is sketchy at best.

In the 1920’s Bernays took on the Beech-Nut Packing Company as a client, tasked to salvage their tanking bacon sales as Americans switched their eating preferences in favor of Kellogg’s heavily promoted (as healthier, and more convenient) dry breakfast cereals, toast, and juice.

Cue Homer Simpson

Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and his remarkable marketing insight, gained in large part by studying his uncle’s ground-breaking clinical methodology, allowed him to successfully pitch cigarette smoking to American women as a way to fulfill their patriotic duty in a campaign branded as the “Torches of Freedom” promotion.

Later, at the height of the Cold War, his campaign on behalf of the CIA influenced United Fruit Company’s banana empire led to the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government. By then the innovative marketing techniques he’d developed promoting bacon for breakfast were an irresistible force, once that consumers to this day are powerless to resist.

In a modern consumer driven economy, free will isn’t as long as there are marketeers willing and capable of opinion shifting strategies. Pass the pork.