I’ve recently linked to a couple of excellent pieces of Charles Duhigg’s reportage for the New York Times (here and here). He has another impressive article, this one for Slate about the hidden corners of consumerism, called “The Power of Habit.” The opening:
“One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American businessman named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with an amazing new creation: a minty, frothy toothpaste named ‘Pepsodent’ that, he promised, was going to be huge.
Hopkins, at the time, was one of the nation’s most famous advertising executives. He was the ad man who had convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the company cleaned their bottles ‘with live steam’ (while neglecting to mention that every other company used the same method). He had seduced millions of women into purchasing Palmolive soap by proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it, despite the sputtering protests of outraged historians.
But Hopkins’ greatest contribution would be helping to create a national toothbrushing habit. Before Pepsodent, almost no Americans brushed their teeth. A decade after Hopkins’ advertising campaigns, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a daily ritual for more than half the population. Everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable eventually bragged about a ‘Pepsodent smile.”
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Steve and Eydie don’t have filthy, scummy teeth, 1978: