A PR step in time: what does Plato and Aristotle have to do with bacon,“Lucky Strikes”and Facebook?

Updated: Mar 21, 2019

If you were a nobleman in Athens, seeking public office in the Athenian democracy back in the fifth century B.C., you would most likely hire a “Sophist” , according to Plato’s descriptions, to teach you the art of persuasion in order to influence the members of the Athenian society towards your election. Persuasion and public attitude change are as old as Pericles’s democracy and Pnyx as a public forum. When Aristotle presented the methods of persuasion in his “Rhetoric”, he established the four cornerstones of modern Public Relations as we know them even to date: Logos, Ethos, Pathos and Kairos.

The father of modern PR, though, is Edward Bernays, born in 1891. Based on Aristotle’s principles and his uncle’s, Sigmund Froud’s, approaches to psychoanalysis, Bernays rebranded propaganda, targeting specific audiences and adding the “s” to publics. He managed to skyrocket bacon sales for his client back in 1920, by persuading a whole nation that bacon and eggs is the perfect American breakfast. He even made smoking “Lucky Strike” cigarettes popular among women, by having fashionable young women displaying their “torches of freedom” in the 1929 New York Easter Parade: Bernays was deeply aware of human psyche and our need to model ourselves around the famous and the beautiful, whom he used as opinion leaders of the time.

In today’s digital world where brands use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so many other digital platforms to build relations and loyalty with their publics, the PR principles still remain the same: “authentic” brands of all fields are amazing storytellers, creating a narrative that transcends their product and appeals to their audiences’ emotions; they are great listeners, paying attention to their publics’ needs; they provide the right context, offering customized experiences to their audiences’ specific needs and wants; they are transparent, building long-term relationships of trust and loyalty with their publics, helping them to make informed choices; finally, they are accessible, promoting further engagement and sincere dialogue with their targeted audiences.

In a modern environment where corporate and political trust and loyalty of publics is constantly challenged and volatile, Bernays’ words from his seminal work Propaganda resonate with today’s reality: “Public relations is not a gimmick, but a necessity”.