Listerine, the asset was already in the building

In 1923, Gerard Barnes Lambert and his younger brother Marion sat down to work out which of Listerine's many uses should become its main one. The product had existed since 1879, created by Joseph Lawrence and named after the surgeon Joseph Lister, and by then it was sold as a surgical disinfectant, a floor cleaner, a deodorant, a dandruff treatment and a remedy for ailments ranging from dysentery to gonorrhoea. It worked and it sold. It had no focus.

Gerard asked the company chemist whether it was any good for bad breath. In his autobiography he describes what happened next. The chemist excused himself, returned with a large book of newspaper clippings, sat down and thumbed through it while Gerard read over his shoulder. Then: here it is, Gerard, it says in this clipping from the British Lancet that in cases of halitosis. Gerard interrupted to ask what halitosis was. The medical term for bad breath, the chemist said. In Lambert's telling he then bustled the poor old fellow out of the room, having found something to hang his hat on.

The company did not invent the word, though a great many books, articles and dental practice blogs still say it did, some of them going so far as to explain incorrectly how Gerard supposedly assembled it from the Latin halitus and the suffix osis. It was coined in 1874 by Joseph William Howe, professor of surgery at Bellevue Hospital in New York, in a book called The Breath, and the Diseases Which Give It a Fetid Odor. That book was not obscure within medicine; it ran to four editions. It was simply unread by everybody outside the profession, which is a different thing.

Gerard had already made the same kind of move once. On returning to his father's company he argued that the alcohol in Listerine was not potable and therefore should not be taxed at the same rate as drinking spirits. He won, and the margin on every bottle improved. Nothing was invented in that case either. He had looked at what the company already had and noticed that one of its facts was worth money.

What followed the halitosis discovery is one of the most effective advertising campaigns of the century and one of the most criticised. It did not simply claim the product treated bad breath, which dentists had been told for thirty years to little effect. It reframed an ordinary condition as a medical one that a person could be suffering from without knowing, and built a national anxiety on top of it.

The honest limits. The scene in the room comes from Lambert's own memoir, published in 1956, thirty-three years after the meeting, written by the man whose triumph it was, and no other participant recorded it. The independently verifiable parts are Howe's coinage, the campaign's existence and its effect, and the widely repeated claim that Lambert coined the word, which is false. Treat the dialogue as one man's account and the rest as documented.

Your company holds a version of that 1923 meeting every year. It nearly always ends in a decision to buy something or build something. It almost never ends with somebody going to look at what is already in the building.

The thing Lambert was missing was not a product, a formula or a market. It was a word, and the word was upstairs in a filing cabinet. That is the awkward part, because asset registers catch equipment, licences and headcount, and they never catch a use case, an audience or a sentence, which is where the unused value usually sits. Nobody can requisition a word.

Notice what actually changed in the language. Everything the company had been saying was about itself: antiseptic, germ killer, disinfectant. Halitosis was about the customer. It named something a person had, in the register of a diagnosis rather than an insult, which is why it could be said in an advertisement at all.

There is a structural reason nobody does this, and it is not laziness. Buying something new gets announced in a meeting and attaches to a name. Finding something you already had does not, and it quietly implies that the thing was missed for years. The incentives point at purchase.

So before the next tool, the next hire, the next line of spend, the cheaper move is to read your own material: what you already say, what you already sell, what the file already contains. And do not only count equipment, because the unused thing is more often a use case, an audience or a phrase. Lambert did not need a new product. He needed somebody whose job was to read the company's own files, and almost nobody has that job. For the same move made with a process instead of a word, see Schlitz.

Source: Gerard B. Lambert, All Out of Step: A Personal Chronicle, Doubleday, 1956, which is the source of the clippings-book scene and the only account of it. The word: Joseph William Howe, The Breath, and the Diseases Which Give It a Fetid Odor, 1874. A detailed history including the memoir passage and the correction of the coinage myth: From Surgical Suite to Fresh Breath: The History of Listerine, International Journal of Dentistry and Oral Health, 2018. The campaign's social history is covered in the Smithsonian's account of how bad breath became an American anxiety.

Obviously Awesome

April Dunford, 2019

This entry's lesson is a positioning lesson rather than a history one, and Dunford's book is the only place I know where it is written down as a procedure. Her argument is that companies default to describing themselves in the terms they already think in, and that the fix is to inventory what you actually have and then find the context where those things matter to somebody else. That is the Listerine move, turned into something you can do on a Monday.