During the late 20s, Edward Bernays, the father of Public Relations, set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke. At that time there was a taboo against women smoking and one of his early clients George Hill, the President of the American Tobacco corporation, asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it. He said that they were losing half of their market because men had invoked a taboo against women smoking in public. So the guy asked Bernays if he could do anything about that. Bernays then called one of the first psychoanalysts in America to find out what cigarettes mean to women (instead of calling his uncle, no other than Mr. Freud, who was out in Vienna).
And for a large fee, he told Bernays that cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power.

He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, then women would start smoking because it is then they would have their own penises.

Every year New York held an Easter day parade to which thousands came. Bernays took the opportunity to stage an event there.

So he persuaded a group of rich debutants to hide cigarettes under their clothes and join the parade. Then at a given signal from him, they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically.

Afterwards, Bernays informed the press that he had heard that a group of suffragettes were preparing to protest by lighting up what they called — torches of freedom.

He knew this would be an outcry, and he knew that all of the photographers would be there to capture this moment, therefore he was ready with a phrase which was “torches of freedom”.

So here you have a symbol, women, young women, debutantes, smoking a cigarette in public with a phrase, which means that anybody who believes in this kind of equality pretty much has to support them in the ensuing debate about this, because… “torches of freedom”.

I mean, what’s on all the American coins? it’s liberty, she’s holding up the torch, you see? and so all of this is there together, there’s emotion, there’s memory and there’s a rational phrase, even knowing it’s using a lot of emotional, it’s a phrase that works in a rational sense…

And so the next day this was not just in all the New York papers, it was across the United States and around the world.

And from that point forward the sale of cigarettes to woman began to rise.

He had made them socially acceptable with a single symbolic act.

What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent.

An idea that still persists today.

It made him realize that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you link products to their emotional desires and feelings.

The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational.

But it made them feel more independent.

It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others.

Conclusions:
1. Cigarretes are irrelevant objects.
2. Thinking that cigarettes contribute to your self-esteem, to your personal brand, to your image is irrational.

Note! This is an extract from the documentary The Century of the Self.