Bacon and eggs

The campaign

In the early 1920s the Beech-Nut Packing Company of Canajoharie, New York, wanted to sell more bacon. Americans at the time mostly ate a light breakfast, coffee and a roll or juice, and the company's problem was not its competitors but the meal itself. It retained Edward Bernays, who had opened his public relations office in 1919 and was building a practice on the principle that a product sells better when the sale is made by someone else.

Bernays's own account, given in his memoirs and repeated in interviews into his nineties, is the main source for what followed, and it should be read as the account of a man proud of his work. He asked the company's physician whether a heavier breakfast was better for health than a light one. The physician said it was, since the body loses energy overnight and needs to replace it. Bernays then asked the physician to write to several thousand of his colleagues putting the same question, and some forty-five hundred replied that a hearty breakfast was better. The result was released to the newspapers as a survey of physicians recommending a hearty breakfast, and the stories, in Bernays's telling, specified bacon and eggs as the hearty breakfast in question. Sales rose, and the meal became, within a generation, the thing people meant when they said "a proper American breakfast".

No bacon company was quoted. No advertisement was placed. The physicians said something true in the narrow sense, that a substantial breakfast is better than none, and the newspapers reported it as news, and the product rode in on the back of the news.

Who ran it and why

Bernays ran it, for a client, and said so later with evident pleasure. The method was the one he had used for Lucky Strike, the Torches of Freedom, and would use for Procter & Gamble, General Electric, and the United Fruit Company: find the authority the public already trusts, arrange for that authority to say something that helps the client, and let the public draw the conclusion the client wants. He called it the engineering of consent and thought it a public service, since the public would otherwise be swayed by less competent persuaders.

The case is useful because it is so small. There is no war, no ideology, no injured party beyond the national waistline. The whole apparatus of the technique can be seen in one episode: a question framed to produce the answer, a sample chosen to agree, an authority placed between the client and the public, and a press that carried the result because it looked like information.

The techniques, in order of weight

Appeal To Authority is the core. The physicians' opinion was the entire content of the campaign, and the physicians were real. What was engineered was the question they were asked and the use to which the answer was put.

Loaded Question: "Is a hearty breakfast better than a light one?" invites one answer and excludes the question that mattered, which was whether bacon in particular had anything to recommend it.

Misleading Statistics: forty-five hundred physicians agreeing that breakfast is good for you is a true number that implies a false one, namely that forty-five hundred physicians recommended bacon.

Leak And Plant: the survey went to the press as news rather than to the public as advertising, and was believed accordingly.

Paid Expert, in its earliest commercial form: the originating physician was the company's own, and the survey carried his name, not the company's.

Appeal To Tradition, as the campaign's long result: within a generation the manufactured meal was defended as the way Americans had always eaten.

The artifacts

The campaign left few physical traces, which is itself the point: there was no poster, no advertisement, no branded material. Its artifacts are newspaper stories reporting a survey, and the trade is in the gap between what the stories said and what they implied. The archive's example for this case is drawn instead from the campaign's most notorious descendant, the R. J. Reynolds "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette" series of 1946 to 1952, which took Bernays's method and added a picture.

The Camel advertisements showed a physician, white-coated and reassuring, beside the claim, and the claim rested on a survey the company's own agency had conducted. Representatives had visited medical conventions, handed out free packets of Camels, and then asked the doctors which brand they smoked. The number was real. The method that produced it was the bacon method, with the sample primed rather than merely selected. Historians Martha Gardner and Allan Brandt, who traced the series through the industry's internal documents, found that the company knew exactly what the survey measured and chose the wording of the claim to make the public hear something else.

The series ended in 1952, as the first lung cancer studies reached the public and the industry decided that doctors were no longer an asset. Within two years the same industry would be presenting itself as the sponsor of independent research into the question, the subject of the tobacco doubt case.

What happened

Beech-Nut's bacon sales rose, by Bernays's account, and the breakfast became standard. The episode has been retold so often, by Bernays himself, by his biographer Larry Tye, and in documentaries on the history of public relations, that it has become a parable, and the retellings have added details the sources do not support. The reliable core is Bernays's own description of the method, and the method is what matters.

The expert survey became a staple of marketing. "Nine out of ten dentists recommend", "doctors prefer", and the sponsored study whose question was written by the sponsor all descend from the bacon campaign. The pharmaceutical, food, and tobacco industries used the device for decades, and the tobacco industry's "More doctors smoke Camels" campaign of the 1940s, built on surveys conducted by the company's own agency at medical conventions where free cigarettes had just been distributed, is its most notorious descendant.

There is also a lesson about memory. The bacon story has been retold so often that it has acquired a shape the sources do not quite support: the number of physicians varies between tellings, the newspapers are sometimes said to have specified bacon and eggs when Bernays's own account is vaguer, and the whole episode is sometimes dated to a decade in which Bernays was not yet working for the company. The retellings are themselves a small case of a technique, the manufactured consensus by which a good story becomes a fact through repetition. A reader who checks the sources will find a true core, a method clearly described by its inventor, and a legend grown around it.

What it teaches

The bacon campaign is the cleanest example in the catalog of an authority being used rather than consulted. The physicians were not lying and the newspapers were not corrupt; the technique was in the arrangement around them. When a survey of experts arrives as news, the reader's questions are the ones Bernays hoped no one would ask: who wrote the question, who chose the sample, who paid, and what is being sold on the strength of the answer.