Edward Bernays Invented Modern Marketing in 1928. Here's What He Knew That Most Brands Still Don't.

In 1928, a man published a slim book called Propaganda and laid out, with complete transparency and zero apology, exactly how he intended to manipulate public opinion at scale.

He wasn't embarrassed about it. He thought mass psychological influence was not only inevitable but necessary - a tool that a well-functioning modern society required. And he spent the next 67 years proving, in campaign after campaign and client after client, that he was right.

His name was Edward Bernays. Most people have never heard of him, but every marketer is using his playbook.

Who was Edward Bernays?

Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 - the same city, the same year, as his uncle Sigmund Freud. That connection was not incidental. Freud had spent his career mapping the unconscious architecture of the human mind - the desires, fears, and drives that operate beneath rational thought and shape behaviour without the person's awareness. Bernays read everything his uncle published and saw, almost immediately, a commercial application.

If Freud had diagnosed the unconscious mind, Bernays intended to sell to it.

He came of age professionally during World War I, working for the U.S. Committee on Public Information - a government propaganda apparatus tasked with packaging and selling the war to the American public. The experience taught him something that would define his career: that mass opinion was not fixed. It was a medium, and with the right pressure applied in the right places, it could be shaped.

After the war, he opened a public relations consultancy in New York. He would go on to work for presidents, corporations, foreign governments, and institutions of every kind. He coined the term 'public relations' deliberately - it was a rebranding of 'propaganda,' a word that was beginning to carry uncomfortable connotations. The practice was identical, but the name was more palatable (marketing, am I right?).

Bernays died in 1995 at the age of 103, having lived long enough to watch everything he invented become the entire internet.

The book that changed everything

Propaganda, published in 1928, is a short book - 159 pages - but its implications are enormous. Bernays' central argument was this: in a complex modern society, the average person cannot be expected to research and evaluate every decision from first principles. They rely, consciously and unconsciously, on the opinions of people and institutions they trust. This creates a mechanism - invisible but powerful - through which a skilled operator can guide mass behaviour by shaping the conditions under which people form their opinions.

"Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." - Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

He called what he did 'the engineering of consent.' The phrase is worth sitting with. He didn't choose to use the word 'persuasion' or 'advertising'. No, the man said 'engineering.' The implication is precision - a systematic, scientific approach to producing a specific outcome in a target population.

Before Bernays, advertising was largely functional. It described what a product did and why someone might need it. Soap cleaned things. A car moved people from one place to another. The job of an ad was accurate description.

Bernays thought this was naive and ineffective. People don't make decisions based on accurate descriptions. They make decisions based on how a product makes them feel, what it says about them to other people, and whether the people they respect seem to endorse it. So he stopped trying to describe products and started engineering the emotional and social context in which people encountered them.

He promoted soap not as a cleaning product but as the foundation of beauty, social acceptance, and personal worth. He reframed breakfast by persuading doctors to publicly endorse a hearty breakfast including bacon and eggs - creating the 'most important meal of the day' narrative from institutional authority rather than advertising spend. He turned the light bulb into a symbol of American progress. He sold Ivory soap to children as a medium for art by running a national soap-carving competition.

None of these were accidents. Each was a designed intervention in the conditions under which people formed opinions and made choices.

The Torches of Freedom: the first viral marketing campaign

In 1929, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to solve a specific problem. Women represented an almost entirely untapped cigarette market, but smoking in public was considered socially unacceptable for women at the time. The company's president was pretty blunt about it: if he could get women to smoke outdoors, he could nearly double the female market.

Bernays consulted a psychoanalyst named Dr. A.A. Brill, a student of Freud, who explained that cigarettes were unconsciously associated with male power and status. The social taboo against women smoking in public was, at its root, a taboo against women claiming that power for themselves.

Bernays saw the opening immediately. He would not advertise cigarettes to women. He would connect cigarettes to something women already wanted - equality, autonomy, the right to occupy public space on the same terms as men - and let that connection do the selling.

He organized a group of women to march in the 1929 New York City Easter Parade - one of the most photographed public events of the year - lighting cigarettes and calling them 'torches of freedom.' He tipped off the press in advance. His own secretary posed as an independent women's rights advocate recruiting participants. The women who marched appeared entirely self-motivated, and none of the commercial backing was disclosed.

The photos ran in newspapers across the states, and American women saw images of stylish, confident women smoking in public and understood it as a statement about liberation, not a cigarette advertisement. The campaign generated national conversation. Women began smoking in public in significantly higher numbers. Cigarette sales to women increased substantially in the years that followed.

Bernays had manufactured a social movement to sell cigarettes. The press covered it as news, and nobody knew he had orchestrated it. That is the Torches of Freedom campaign - and it is the direct ancestor of every 'authentic' brand moment you've seen on Instagram this week.

The ethical implications are significant and worth talking about. Bernays used the language of women's liberation to sell a product that would eventually kill many of its consumers. He fabricated grassroots support that didn't exist, and concealed commercial intent behind the appearance of social activism. These are serious criticisms, his behaviour was deeply unethical, and, if I'm going to break the authorial fourth wall here for a second, they were super gross.

But, if we strip away his lack of regard for informed consent and the good of public health to look only at the strategic insight underneath, it remains true: people do not buy products. They buy identity, belonging, and the feeling of being understood. The most effective marketing doesn't tell you what it's selling. It connects what it's selling to something the buyer already wants to be.

The techniques that still run the internet

Bernays developed several specific techniques that are now so standard in marketing and public relations that practitioners often don't know they're using them.

Third-party advocacy. Rather than making claims directly, Bernays arranged for trusted voices - doctors, civic leaders, celebrities, experts - to carry his message. The claim landed differently when it came from a doctor than when it came from an advertiser. This is the structural principle behind influencer marketing, expert endorsements, PR coverage, and every brand that has ever said 'as seen in' rather than 'we think.'

The pseudo-event. Bernays understood that news coverage was more persuasive than advertising and considerably cheaper. So he created events designed to generate news coverage - the Easter Parade march being the most famous example. Modern equivalents include brand activations, product launches designed around shareability, and the entire influencer trip genre.

Symbolic association. Connect your product to something your audience already values - freedom, beauty, belonging, progress, identity - and the product inherits the emotional charge of that association. Every brand story, every mission statement, every piece of content designed to make a potential customer feel seen before it mentions a service is doing exactly this.

Engineering the environment, not the message. Bernays rarely tried to change minds directly. He changed the conditions under which people formed opinions - who they heard from, what context the information appeared in, what emotions were activated before the message arrived. Modern content strategy works on the same principle. The goal is not to interrupt someone with an ad. The goal is to be present, trustworthy, and relevant before they are ready to buy, so that when they are ready, the choice feels like it was already made.

What this means for your content strategy

Before we get here, let's chat about our morals for a second: the ethical problems with how Bernays applied his insights are real and they matter. I am, under no circumstances telling you to manufacture a social movement, or run undisclosed ads. Bernays was not a good guy, and I know in my bones you're better than he was.

What I do want you to takeaway is the underlying understanding of human psychology that his work was built on.

People don't buy your services because of the features list. They buy because they trust you, they feel understood by you, and they believe you can produce a specific outcome that they want. Your content's job is to build that trust, create that understanding, and make that outcome feel real and achievable - before anyone picks up the phone or fills in a contact form.

Bernays understood this in 1928. He applied it ruthlessly and without ethical constraint. The insight is separable from the application.

The most effective content is not the content that most accurately describes what you offer. It is the content that most precisely makes the right person feel that you understand their situation.

Every piece of educational content that builds authority before it asks for anything, behind-the-scenes post that makes your process feel familiar before a potential client has experienced it, and client stories that makes a reader think 'that is exactly my situation' is marketing, applied honestly and transparently, in service of a genuine exchange of value between two people. That is what good content marketing actually is.

Bernays did not invent the psychology. He was the first person to apply it systematically to commercial communication. A century later, in a medium he could not have imagined, the same principles are still doing the same work.

If this reframed how you think about your content strategy - that was the point. Book a free strategy consultation at sonderandmedia.com/bookacall or DM us on Instagram @sonderandmedia

Sonder & Media Creative Studio - Social media strategy and content management for growth-stage service businesses. Based in Surrey, BC.