This is a YouTube video titled "How Consumer Brands Manipulate People" containing a discussion about marketing strategies and consumer behavior, including historical examples of how companies have influenced societal norms to expand their markets. The content features at least two speakers sharing insights on marketing tactics and their social impact, recorded on March 13, 2021.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. If you want to be honest for a minute, I can't make any claims, but we have had a lot of conversation about if this happens. Do we talk about it, do we market it? I mean, when we were talking with our, one of our chief scientists, Dr. Kenneth Ferguson, who led the team for Cialis, they said that Viagra and Cialis made a massive mistake. They no longer really sell to women and it was built for women. It's a vasodilator. It helps women more than men. The problem was when they started to market it, women bought it but for their man. And so women had a stigma against using it, still do to this day. And so Viagra and Cialis, though they were home runs, cut off half their market when they launched. Because of the way they launched, they could have been twice as successful. So that is something we're being very interested in. I don't want this to be a one off. This is some platform technology here.
Well, one of the things that I study in my copious spare time is the history of consumer packaged goods marketing. And it is some of the most amazing and sometimes really dark history of like how companies behave. I mean it is so cool when you really get right down to it. But one of the things that happened is that men smoked and women didn't. So the smoking industry hired, this is so bad. They hired basically propagandists who did like national propaganda I believe, and it was actually a relative of Sigmund Freud who did this stuff. And they said, here's what to do. Because the women's suffrage movement was happening at the time. They got about a dozen ladies to march smoking and they branded cigarettes as liberty torches. And you smoked to show your power as a woman. And they doubled their market size. And within a couple years something like 60% of women had started smoking. And then the razor companies, hmm, we're selling razors to men. Our market's half as big as it should be. So what are we going to do? We're going to tell women that, oh, it's dirty to have hairy legs. And within two years every woman shaved their legs. And they're like, haha, look at all the razors we're selling. And they manipulated the crap out of us to do it.
