{"id":45008,"date":"2019-04-04T07:31:50","date_gmt":"2019-04-04T12:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=45008"},"modified":"2019-04-04T07:31:54","modified_gmt":"2019-04-04T12:31:54","slug":"sin-is-a-made-up-religious-marketing-scheme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=45008","title":{"rendered":"Sin Is A Made-Up Religious Marketing Scheme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sin Is A Made-Up Religious Marketing Scheme<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The word \u201chalitosis\u201d is a household term which everyone knows means bad breath. But did you know that the word has been around for less than a hundred years, and was invented not by the medical field, but by advertisers<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in the 1920s, people didn\u2019t worry about body odor as much as they do now. They didn\u2019t bathe nearly as often, they didn\u2019t wear deodorant, and some bodily smells weren\u2019t necessarily considered socially catastrophic. A family antiseptic company called Listerine was able to increase its revenue from $115,000 to $8 million<\/a> over the course of seven years by helping to change that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listerine had been around since the 1880s, marketed as a household cleaner, a medical antiseptic, and a treatment for gonorrhea, among many other uses. Forty years later, the company\u2019s owner and his son came up with the brilliant idea to look up a fancy latin word for bad breath that sounds like a medical condition and then market it as though it\u2019s an actual diagnosable disease that is crippling everyone\u2019s social life. They ran advertisements<\/a> telling wives that their halitosis was making them unappealing to their husbands, telling husbands that their halitosis was making their wives not want to kiss them, telling young women that they\u2019d remain unmarried and unwanted forever if they didn\u2019t cure their \u201cunexcusable\u201d condition with Listerine, even telling mothers<\/a> that their breath may be grossing out their own children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it worked. People began throwing their money at this company, suddenly desperate to cure a horrible medical condition that they\u2019d only just found out was a thing. By manufacturing demand for their product using artificially instilled shame and fear, Listerine made a fortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sin Is A Made-Up Religious Marketing Scheme The word \u201chalitosis\u201d is a household term which everyone knows means bad breath. But did you know that the word has been around for less than a hundred years, and was invented not by the medical field, but by advertisers? Back in the 1920s, people didn\u2019t worry about body […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17039,2081,25515],"class_list":["post-45008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-caitlin-johnstone","tag-marketing","tag-sin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45009,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45008\/revisions\/45009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}