Listerine was a cleaning product until they decided to boost sales by positioning it as a mouthwash.
First, they had to convince everyone that they needed mouthwash, so they invented HALITOSIS (bad breath), and then offered Listerine as the solution.
Lysol tried a similar pivot, except they tried to market their cleaning product as post-sex birth control douche. Listerine’s pivot caught on, Lysol’s didn’t.
Halitosis was already the medical term for bad breath, with evidence of its use in England. All that word did was give an American businessman/marketer a polite euphemism to talk about something that was considered taboo at the time (body odors were associated with poor hygiene and lower status people). It does seem like they pushed hard with marketing to make it into a more widespread “problem” though.
Listerine was a cleaning product until they decided to boost sales by positioning it as a mouthwash.
First, they had to convince everyone that they needed mouthwash, so they invented HALITOSIS (bad breath), and then offered Listerine as the solution.
Lysol tried a similar pivot, except they tried to market their cleaning product as post-sex birth control douche. Listerine’s pivot caught on, Lysol’s didn’t.
do… do you think bad breath is made up???
Halitosis was already the medical term for bad breath, with evidence of its use in England. All that word did was give an American businessman/marketer a polite euphemism to talk about something that was considered taboo at the time (body odors were associated with poor hygiene and lower status people). It does seem like they pushed hard with marketing to make it into a more widespread “problem” though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712170405/http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/thanks-to-chemistry/listerine.aspx