7 Things You Buy Just Because Advertisers Persuade You to

Antiperspirant

Several years ago, sweating was a normal feature of people and was usually associated with hard work, but Edna Murphey created a product essential for preventing body odor, namely the Odorono. Odorono is the first antiperspirant that conquered the world a few years ago.

It’s important to remember that she wasn’t the inventor of antiperspirant, but she was the one who created a successful one. In addition to this, the first deodorant was called Mum and had been trademarked in 1888 and the first antiperspirant was called Everdry and launched in 1903. People were skeptical about the use of deodorant in those days. 

According to Juliann Silvulka, a 20th-century historian of American advertising at Waseda Univesity in Tokyo, Japan, “this was still very much a Victorian society. Nobody talked about perspiration, or any other bodily functions in public.”

That being said, Odorono was created by Edna’s father who was a doctor and wanted a product that could stop his hands from sweating during surgeries. That was the moment when she found another use for Odorono, namely for the armpits.  

At first, she failed to sell the product because no one wanted an antiperspirant, but in 1912 people became interested in antiperspirants because of the summer heat and she earned about $ 30,000 at a fair. After this, she hired an advertising company from New York, called J. Walter Thompson Company, and they helped Edna sell more antiperspirants using a different strategy. For instance, they said that sweating is an embarrassing medical problem and antiperspirant was created by a doctor to treat it.