In 1929, a PR man named Edward Bernays paid women to smoke cigarettes in public and called them "torches of freedom." A century later, the tobacco industry was still running the same play — and women were still paying the price.

In this episode of Brand Strategy and Advertising, cultural historian and Coastal Carolina University Assistant Professor Bob Batchelor traces one of advertising history's most calculated and consequential campaigns: how the tobacco industry hijacked feminism, wave after wave, to sell a product it knew was deadly.

From Hollywood glamour and wartime independence to Virginia Slims' "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" — and the stunning statistic behind it — to the Silk Cut aesthetic strategy and Camel No. 9s' pink packaging, Batchelor follows the industry's playbook across eight decades: find the cultural aspiration, attach the product to it, and never stop adapting.

This episode draws on chapters from We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life, the landmark three-volume anthology Batchelor co-edited. It's essential listening for students of advertising history, brand strategy, marketing ethics, and women's studies — and for anyone who wants to understand how persuasion works at its most sophisticated and most dangerous.

Bob Batchelor is the author or editor of more than 35 books, including Stan Lee: A Life, Roadhouse Blues, and The Bourbon King. Subscribe to Brand Strategy and Advertising wherever you like to listen.

One tear changed everything.

In 1971, a single image — a man in buckskin watching trash hit the roadside, one tear rolling down his face — became one of the most powerful moments in American advertising history. The "Crying Indian" wasn't selling anything. It was selling an idea. And it worked.

But who was really behind it? The answer is more complicated than you think.

In this episode of Brand Strategy and Advertising, cultural historian and Coastal Carolina University Assistant Professor Bob Batchelor traces the collision between advertising craft and social consciousness — from the 1960s creative revolution that shattered Madison Avenue's rulebook to the billion-dollar cause marketing industry that followed.

You'll learn how Bill Bernbach's DDB agency put copywriters and art directors in the same room and accidentally changed everything. How Mary Wells Lawrence painted airplanes and rewrote what a brand could be. And how Thomas Frank's landmark argument — that advertising didn't just mirror the counterculture, it absorbed and sold it back — still plays out in every "purpose-driven" brand campaign you see today.

Plus: the corporate interests hiding behind the Ad Council's most beloved campaigns, why public service advertising is better at shaping how we think about problems than solving them, and the three questions every brand strategist should ask before calling a campaign "socially conscious."

Bob Batchelor is the author of Stan Lee: A Life, Roadhouse Blues, and The Bourbon King, among more than 15 books. He teaches in the Department of Communication, Media, & Culture at Coastal Carolina University.

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The 1960s gave advertising artistry. The 1970s gave it strategy. This episode completes the story.

In Part II, we examine a media landscape flooded with advertising messages, brands that all had personalities, and consumers growing harder to reach by the year. The answer was a concept that now sits at the center of every brand strategy conversation in the industry: positioning.

THE 1970s PIVOT: WHEN EVERYTHING GOT LOUDER

By 1979, total U.S. ad billings had nearly tripled over the start of the decade, reaching $27.9 billion. J. Walter Thompson became the first agency in history to break $1 billion in worldwide volume. The sheer volume of advertising was becoming its own obstacle.

Into that noise, the slogan was reborn — not as a tagline, but as strategy. Theorists Jack Trout and Al Ries gave the decade its central concept: positioning. Not what the product is. Not even what the brand feels like. But where the brand lives in the consumer’s mind relative to every competitor.

7-UP doubled its sales with “The Uncola” by repositioning itself as the alternative to Coke — leveraging the category leader’s dominance against it. Coke answered with “It’s the Real Thing,” claiming authenticity, universality, belonging. BMW declared itself “The Ultimate Driving Machine” in 1975 — tried to replace it with “Joy” in 2010, retreated to the original in 2012. McDonald’s told consumers “You Deserve a Break Today” (Advertising Age’s fifth-best campaign of the century). Burger King answered with “Have It Your Way.” The fast food wars were positioning wars.

BRAND EQUITY: THE ASSET YOU CAN’T TOUCH

The 1970s introduced another concept that runs through every brand strategy conversation: brand equity. Branding expert David Aaker’s key insight: the power of a brand lives in the minds of consumers. It is not a product feature. It is a perception — and perceptions, built through consistent advertising over time, become financial assets.

Aaker also noted what most students overlook: effective slogans communicate internally as much as externally. “You Deserve a Break Today” tells customers what to expect, employees what their job is, and suppliers what standard they must meet. A well-crafted slogan provides a center of gravity for the entire organization — not just a line on a billboard.

THREE PRINCIPLES THAT NEVER STOPPED WORKING

The episode closes with a framework drawn from the full arc of postwar advertising history — three principles as applicable to brand strategy on Instagram today as they were to television in 1965. Advertising manufactures desire, not just awareness. The era of pure product claims ended sixty years ago and isn’t coming back. And positioning is a mental act, not a product act — the battle for market share is the battle for mind share.

The Stan Lee case study ties it together: Lee didn’t just co-create comic book characters. He manufactured desire for a new kind of hero, built a brand image — Marvel’s irreverent, self-aware personality — distinct from DC’s establishment tone, and positioned Marvel in readers’ minds not just as a publisher but as a community, a sensibility, a way of seeing the world.

ABOUT THE HOST

Dr. Bob Batchelor is a cultural historian, professor at Coastal Carolina University, and editor of the three-volume anthology We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life. His books include Stan Lee: A Life, Roadhouse Blues, and The Bourbon King. Subscribe to Brand Strategy and Advertising on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for new episodes connecting advertising history to the strategies shaping brands today.