Public Relations
9/08/12
Dr. Pampaloni
Father of Public Relations
Public relations uses the media to create an image for businesses, organizations, and high profiled people emphasizing the means of advertisement and propaganda in which it is used to sell a product and/or manipulate something in the interest of any of the particular areas (Lattimore, Baskin, Heiman, and Toth). In the field of public relations there have been many great innovators , all whom have left their mark over the years in the area of the publics views on certain aspects of business and life itself. Although there has been many to come and go there is only one that has taken the title “the father of public relations” due to his outstanding ability to take the littlest idea and turn it into either a largely scaled public event all the way to a huge business promotion for numerous companies or even change the image of very well known figures of his time.
Bernays death in 1995 brought much discussion of how he was “the father of public relations” due to his many contributions and what he did for defining a very unique and effective way of creating images for his client’s consumers or public. For instance during World War I he worked with Woodrow Wilson’s administration to help create the idea that American war efforts were to bring democracy to Europe in its entirety which successfully swayed the thinking of Americans abroad and at home (The image makers). Bernays was greatly amazed by the way that people took to his propaganda and as a result got him thinking that if it could work in times of war, why not try it in peace times in all deciding to “take his talents” to an industrialized America which turned out to be somewhat of a goldmine in the eyes of Bernays. Uncle of Edward Bernays Sigmund Freud; a pioneer in the field of psychoanalysis or aspects of human behavior, had theories that looked into the world of the human subconscious taking a look at their deepest fears and secrets. Freud believed it was a key to understanding people’s deepest desires of the masses (The image makers). Due to most of his work having to deal with the subconscious of the public Edward Bernays took allot of what is uncle had to offer and used it to his advantage. Bernays took aspects of public relations such as propaganda, which he literally wrote the book on, and spin and applied them using his uncle’s writings and studies. He could take the simplest message and transform it into a phenomenon that would prove to even sometimes change people’s perspective on some of the most frowned upon ideas. Bernays was the first to take this idea and run with it using it with large companies showing them that they could use it to manipulate the masses into buying their products that in most cases weren’t even needed of course because of how propaganda was widely used by the German during the war he began to promote instead the term “Public Relations”. During the 1920s the American Tobacco companies numbers weren’t exactly where they wanted them to be at so Bernays was recruited to change that. The company was being mostly affected in the area of women smokers because of how it was something that was looked down upon by the public, women smoking in public places that is. Bernays had the clever idea to literally take this to the streets of New York, he took it upon himself to recruit some women that he knew to go and walk in the Easter Day parade and on his signal to light “Torches of Freedom” in front of the media that was present at the event (The image makers). The story was top news the next day and within weeks many public establishments began to allow women to smoke in the smoking areas as men did. Edward Bernays took another step in the advancement of American Tobacco, more specifically Lucky Strike cigarettes in 1934 when he made contact with many different designers and socially important people and informed them that the years color had to be