How the history of toothpaste explains why you can’t lose weight (Part 1)
One day in the early 1900s, a prominent Americanbusinessman named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with an amazing new creation: a minty, frothy toothpaste named “Pepsodent” that, he promised, was going to be huge.
Hopkins, at the time, was one of the nation’s most famous advertising executives. He was the ad man who had convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the company cleaned their bottles “with live steam” (while neglecting to mention that every other company used the same method). He had seduced millions of women into purchasing Palmolive soap by proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it, despite the sputtering protests of outraged historians.
But Hopkins’ greatest contribution would be helping to create a national toothbrushing habit. Before Pepsodent, almost no Americans brushed their teeth. A decade after Hopkins’ advertising campaigns, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a daily ritual for more than half the population. Everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable eventually bragged about a “Pepsodent smile.”
So, how did Hopkins start America brushing?
By taking advantage of a quirk in the neurology of habits. It wouldn’t be until almost a century later that medical schools and psychology labs would fully understand why habits exist and how they function. Today, we can create and change habits almost like flipping a switch.
But there are historical outliers who seemed to intuitc or accidentally stumble into – these insights before anyone else. Hopkins created a toothbrushing habit by identifying a simple and obvious cue, delivering a clear reward and —most important —by creating a neurological craving.
And craving, it turns out, is what powers a habit.
When Hopkins signed on to promote Pepsodent, he realized he needed to find a trigger for its daily use. He sat down with a pile of dental textbooks. “It was dry reading,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “But in the middle of one book I found a reference to the mucin plaques on teeth, which I afterward called ‘the film.’
“That gave me an appealing idea. I resolved to advertise this toothpaste as a creator of beauty.”
Soon, cities were plastered with Pepsodent ads. “Just run your tongue across your teeth,” read one. “You’ll feel a film—that’s what makes your teeth look ‘off color’ and invites decay.”
“Note how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere,” read another. “Millions are using a new method of teeth cleansing. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the film!”
All habits—no matter how large or small—have three components, according to neurological studies. There’s a cue—a trigger for a particular behavior; a routine, which is the behavior itself; and a reward, which is how your brain decides whether to remember a habit for the future. When Hopkins identified tooth film, he found a cue that had existed for eons. Moreover, the reward that Hopkins was promising was hard to resist. Who doesn’t want a prettier smile? Particularly when all it takes is a quick brush with Pepsodent?
Three weeks after the first Pepsodent ad campaign, demand for the toothpaste exploded. There were so many orders that the company couldn’t keep up. In three years, the product went international. Within a decade, Pepsodent was one of the top sellers around the globe.
“I made for myself a million dollars on Pepsodent,” Hopkins wrote a few years after the product appeared on shelves. The key, he said, was that he had grounded his advertising campaign in two basic rules:
First, find a simple and obvious cue.
Second, clearly define the rewards.
Even today, Hopkins’s rules are a staple of marketing textbooks. They’re cited in boardrooms, advertising offices, and business school classrooms.
But that’s not the full explanation of why Pepsodent was such a success. There’s another rule that even Hopkins, at the time, didn’t understand.
* * *
The first time I spoke to Wolfram Schultz, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, I kept thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schultz is from Austria and sounds a lot like the Terminator, if that cyborg had been a member of the Royal Society of science. The reason I sought out Schultz was because his experiments, 80 years later, explained why Pepsodent became a hit and why so many other habits seem so overpowering to the people under their sway.
Schultz’s specialty is exploring how we learn. In particular, a few years ago Schultz became interested in an eight-pound macaque monkey with hazel eyes named Julio. Schultz’s assistants had inserted a very thin electrode into Julio’s brain that allowed them to observe the monkey’s neuronal activity as it occurred.
One day, Schultz positioned Julio in a dimly lit room and turned on a computer monitor. Julio’s job was to touch a lever whenever colored shapes appeared on the screen. If Julio touched the lever, a drop of blackberry juice would run down a tube hanging from the ceiling and onto Julio’s lips.
Julio liked blackberry juice.
At first, Julio was only mildly interested in what was happening on the screen. But once the first dose of juice arrived, the monkey became very focused. As Julio came to understand that the shapes on the screen were a cue for a routine (touch the lever) that resulted in a reward (blackberry juice), he started staring at the screen with a laserlike intensity.
