Concept
Problem Creation Advertising
advertising persuasion history
Rather than persuading people to buy a product by describing its benefits, some of history's most behavior-changing ad campaigns instead invented or popularized a problem the audience didn't previously believe they had — then positioned the product as the obvious solution. Changing how people perceive a problem, per this technique, produces more durable behavior change than changing how they perceive a product.
Pepsodent (Claude Hopkins). In the early 1900s only about 7% of American households owned toothpaste, and the US military considered its recruits' oral hygiene a national crisis. Claude Hopkins built an ad campaign around the "dingy film" naturally present on everyone's teeth — a real but harmless membrane — framing it as something ugly and full of germs, then presenting Pepsodent as the cure. Within a decade, US toothpaste adoption rose from roughly 7% to 65% (see Pepsodent Toothpaste Habit Campaign).
Listerine and "halitosis." Up until the 1920s, bad breath wasn't a named, socially stigmatized condition — it simply wasn't something people commented on. Listerine's owner, Jordan Wheat Lambert, built an advertising strategy around promoting the problem of bad breath (rebranded with the clinical-sounding term "halitosis") rather than the product itself, running ads suggesting bad breath could cost someone marriage or romance. Between 1922 and 1929, Listerine's earnings rose from around $100,000 to more than $8 million, with advertising spend rising in lockstep — the product, packaging, and formula never changed (see Listerine Halitosis Invention Campaign).
Practical implication: rather than marketing a toothbrush by its bristle technology, or a car by its horsepower, marketers following this approach identify or manufacture a relatable problem the audience will recognize in themselves once named — a technique that works because it changes the frame a customer uses to interpret their own everyday experience, not just their opinion of one product.
Discussed in
- Episode 120 — 120-five-ads-that-changed-the-world