Ever wonder why you give a diamond ring to propose, or why Santa wears a red suit? You might think it’s ancient history, but it’s actually brilliant marketing.
Let’s be real, we’re swimming in a sea of ads. With companies spending billions a year on advertising in the U.S., they’re not just trying to sell you stuff—they’re shaping the very culture we live in.
And it works. Research from the University of Southern California shows that ads with an emotional pull are nearly twice as successful as ads that just focus on rational facts (a 31% success rate versus 16%). Marketers know that the best way to sell a product is to sell a story, a feeling, or even a tradition.
The wildest part? Many of the “timeless” traditions and cultural icons we cherish weren’t passed down through generations—they were invented in a boardroom to solve a business problem. As writer Norman Douglas once said, “You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements”.
So, let’s pull back the curtain on some of the most famous American legends that were actually created by marketing, not history.
The Diamond engagement ring wasn’t a timeless tradition
You know the drill: guy gets on one knee, opens a little box, and reveals a sparkling diamond. It feels like a tradition as old as time, right? Not even close.
Sure, people in ancient Rome exchanged promise rings, but the whole “diamond is a must” rule is a 20th-century invention. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, diamond prices were crashing. At the time, only about 10% of American engagement rings even had a diamond.
So, in 1938, the diamond cartel De Beers hired the N.W. Ayer ad agency with a simple goal: change the public’s mind. They started placing diamonds on glamorous movie stars and running sophisticated ads linking the stones to eternal love and romance.
Then, in 1947, a copywriter came up with what Advertising Age would later call the slogan of the century: “A Diamond Is Forever”. It was genius. Suddenly, a diamond wasn’t just a rock; it was a symbol of a marriage that would last a lifetime. To seal the deal, De Beers also invented the “two months’ salary” rule out of thin air, giving men a benchmark for how much to spend.
De Beers didn’t just sell a product; they manufactured a cultural ritual that’s still with us today.
Santa Claus got his modern look from Coca-Cola
We all know what Santa looks like: a big, jolly man with a white beard, rosy cheeks, and a bright red suit. But that image wasn’t always the standard. Before the 1930s, Santa was depicted in all sorts of ways—sometimes as a tall, skinny man, sometimes as a spooky-looking elf.
In the early 1930s, Coca-Cola had a problem: people weren’t buying a cold drink in the winter. To boost sales, they decided to tie their brand to Christmas. In 1931, they commissioned illustrator Haddon Sundblom to create a warm, friendly, and “wholesome” Santa for their holiday ads.
Drawing inspiration from the 1822 poem “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” Sundblom created the grandfatherly figure we now know and love.
The campaign was so effective that Sundblom’s Santa became the definitive version, cementing a specific image of Christmas in the minds of millions around the world.
Father’s Day was a scheme to sell more neckties
The idea for Father’s Day actually came from a very sweet place. In 1910, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd wanted to honor her father, a Civil War veteran who raised six children on his own. But here’s the thing: for decades, the holiday just didn’t catch on. Many men thought it was silly and just a “commercial stunt” to replicate Mother’s Day.
Then, the Great Depression hit. Menswear retailers were struggling and saw an opportunity. Recognizing how much money florists were making on Mother’s Day, a group called the New York Associated Men’s Wear Retailers formed a “Father’s Day Committee” in 1936. Their goal was simple: convince everyone that the best way to honor Dad was with gifts of neckties and shirts.
It took a while, but the commercial push eventually worked. President Nixon didn’t make Father’s Day a national holiday until 1972.
So while the original idea was heartfelt, it was commercial interests that turned Father’s Day into the holiday we know today.
Mother’s Day’s founder fought its commercialization
Unlike Father’s Day, Mother’s Day had a powerful start, thanks to its founder, Anna Jarvis. She created the day in 1908 to honor her own mother, a community activist.
Her vision was for a simple, personal day of reflection. People were meant to visit their mothers or wear a white carnation in their honor. The idea was so popular that it became a national holiday in 1914.
But then the marketers moved in. By the 1920s, florists, candy makers, and greeting card companies had turned her sentimental holiday into a commercial free-for-all.
Anna Jarvis was horrified. She spent the rest of her life and her entire fortune fighting against the commercialization of the holiday. She called the industry profiteers “charlatans, bandits, pirates, [and] racketeers” and urged people to stop buying cards and flowers.
She failed. Today, Mother’s Day is a retail giant. It’s a bittersweet story of a beautiful idea that was completely consumed by the very commercialism its founder despised.
Orange juice for breakfast was an advertiser’s idea
A glass of orange juice is a breakfast classic, right up there with coffee and toast. But the idea of drinking your oranges is a surprisingly modern invention.
In the early 1900s, California orange growers had way too many oranges and not enough people to buy them. They hired Albert Lasker, often called the “father of modern advertising,” to solve their problem.
Lasker had a brilliant insight: people might eat one orange, but it takes two or three to make a glass of juice. So, he rebranded the growers’ co-op as “Sunkist” and launched the now-famous “Drink an Orange” campaign, creating a brand-new daily ritual for Americans.
To make sure the new habit stuck, his agency even invented and sold a glass orange juice extractor for just 10 cents. The campaign was a game-changer. The average consumption of oranges per serving shot up.
Before Lasker, orange juice wasn’t really a thing. After him, it became an essential part of the American breakfast.
Women started shaving their armpits because of a razor ad
For most of history, body hair on women just wasn’t a big deal. Clothes were modest, so no one really saw it or cared. That all changed in 1915. Sleeveless dresses were coming into fashion, and for the first time, women’s underarms were on display. The Gillette company, which had a huge market for men’s razors, saw a golden opportunity to double its customer base.
So, they launched an ad campaign in the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. The ads didn’t just sell a razor; they created a problem. They framed underarm hair as “unfashionable,” “unhygienic,” and an “embarrassing personal problem”.
Gillette introduced the first razor marketed specifically to women, the “Milady Decolletee,” promising to keep the underarm “white and smooth”. The shame-based marketing worked like a charm.
By the 1960s, a significant percentage of American women between 15 and 44 were removing body hair, a social norm created almost entirely by an ad campaign.
The Marlboro Man was created to make filtered cigarettes manly
The Marlboro Man—rugged, independent, the epitome of American masculinity. He’s one of the most iconic ad figures of all time. But he was created to solve a very specific, and kind of funny, problem.
Originally, in the 1920s, Marlboro was a cigarette for women, sold with the slogan “Mild as May”. When health concerns about smoking started to rise in the 1950s, tobacco companies introduced filtered cigarettes. The problem? Men thought filters were feminine.
Philip Morris hired ad genius Leo Burnett to rebrand the cigarette for men. Burnett’s idea was to create a persona so overwhelmingly masculine it would erase any doubts about the product. He considered sea captains and construction workers before landing on the ultimate symbol of American toughness: the cowboy.
The campaign was an absolute blockbuster. Marlboro went from a niche women’s brand with less than 1% of the market to the best-selling cigarette in the world, all thanks to a fictional cowboy.
Betty Crocker was never a real person
For generations, Betty Crocker has been one of America’s most trusted names in the kitchen. Her cookbooks are staples, and her name is synonymous with baking. The only thing is, she didn’t exist.
She was invented in 1921 by the Washburn-Crosby Company, which would later become General Mills. The company ran a promotion and was flooded with baking questions from customers. The all-male ad department felt that a woman should be the one to answer them.
So, they created a persona. “Betty” was chosen because it sounded friendly, and “Crocker” was the last name of a retired company director. A female employee penned her famous signature, and Betty Crocker was born.
She became a sensation. Her radio cooking show, launched in 1924, had over a million listeners. Betty Crocker became a “kitchen confidante” to millions, a testament to how a fictional character can become a more trusted authority than a real person.
Paul Bunyan was popularized to sell lumber
The legend of Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack with his blue ox, Babe, feels like a classic piece of American folklore, passed down around campfires for centuries.
The truth is a little more corporate. While there were some tall tales about a giant logger circulating in the Great Lakes region in the late 1800s, the Paul Bunyan we know today was largely the creation of an advertising campaign.
In 1914, the Red River Lumber Company wanted a way to promote their business. They hired a writer named William B. Laughead, who took the old, inconsistent logger stories, cleaned them up, and embellished them for a mass audience.It was Laughead who gave the ox his famous name, “Babe”. His 1922 promotional booklet,
The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan, was a huge hit, and the company gave away over 100,000 copies. The character became so commercialized that one folklorist coined the term “fakelore” to describe him. The campaign successfully romanticized the logging industry, turning a niche folktale into a national hero to sell “Paul Bunyan’s pine”.
“Torches of Freedom” made it cool for women to smoke
In the 1920s, it was considered improper for women to smoke in public. For the American Tobacco Company, this social taboo meant they were missing out on half their potential customers—a “gold mine,” as the company president put it.
To solve this, they hired Edward Bernays, the so-called “father of public relations”. Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, knew he couldn’t just sell cigarettes; he had to sell an idea. He consulted a psychoanalyst who told him that cigarettes could be positioned as a symbol of male power. If women smoked, it could be framed as a challenge to that power.
Bernays dubbed cigarettes “torches of freedom.” For the 1929 Easter Sunday Parade in New York City, he hired a group of fashionable young women to march down Fifth Avenue, defiantly smoking their “torches” for all to see. He made sure the press was there to capture the “protest.”
The stunt worked perfectly. It was a masterful, if manipulative, campaign that linked a product to a powerful social movement.
The word “halitosis” was marketed to sell Listerine
Nobody likes bad breath, but for most of history, it was just a minor personal issue. It wasn’t until the 1920s that it became a medical condition called “halitosis”—thanks to a brilliant marketing campaign for Listerine.
Listerine was originally developed in the 1880s as a surgical antiseptic. It was sold for everything from cleaning floors to treating gonorrhea, but its sales were pretty mediocre.
The owners decided to focus on one use: a mouthwash. To make it sell, they needed to make bad breath sound like a serious problem. They dug up an obscure, scientific-sounding medical term, “halitosis,” and built an entire ad campaign around it.
Their ads preyed on social anxiety, featuring tragic characters like “Edna,” who was “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” because of her secret affliction. The message was clear: halitosis will ruin your life, but Listerine can save you. The fear-based campaign was a smash hit, and sales.
The “Breakfast of Champions” was born in an ad agency
“The Breakfast of Champions” is one of the most famous slogans in advertising history, forever linking Wheaties cereal with athletic greatness.
But it wasn’t based on any scientific study or athlete survey. It was just a catchy phrase thought up on the spot by an ad man named Knox Reeves in the 1930s. When his agency was asked what to put on a new billboard for the struggling cereal, he simply sketched a box and wrote down the now-iconic line.
General Mills ran with it. They started sponsoring baseball broadcasts and, in 1934, put New York Yankees star Lou Gehrig on the back of the box—the first of more than 850 athletes to be featured. The strategy of associating the cereal with sports heroes turned the brand around.
The slogan became so ingrained in American culture that author Kurt Vonnegut used it as the title of his satirical 1973 novel, a commentary on the emptiness of American consumerism.
The “We Can Do It!” poster wasn’t who you think she was
You know the poster: a woman in a red polka-dot bandana, flexing her bicep under the words “We Can Do It!” Everyone knows her as Rosie the Riveter, the face of the government’s campaign to get women into factories during World War II.
Except, that’s almost all wrong. The term “Rosie the Riveter” came from a popular 1942 song. The most famous wartime image of Rosie was actually a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943.
The “We Can Do It!” poster, on the other hand, was created by an artist for the Westinghouse Electric Company. It wasn’t a public recruitment tool at all. It was an internal poster displayed for just two weeks inside Westinghouse factories to boost employee morale and discourage strikes.
The poster was basically forgotten until the 1980s, when it was rediscovered and adopted by the feminist movement as a symbol of female empowerment—a meaning it never had in the 1940s.
The California Raisins were a hit band made of fruit
In the mid-1980s, raisins had an image problem: they were boring. The California Raisin Advisory Board (CALRAB) had tried everything to make them cool, but nothing worked.
Then, in 1986, an ad agency came up with a wild idea: a claymation band of anthropomorphic raisins, wearing sunglasses and sneakers, dancing to the Motown classic “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”.
The commercial was an instant sensation. Raisin sales shot up by 20%. But it didn’t stop there. The fictional band became a real pop culture phenomenon.
Their version of the song charted on the Billboard Hot 100. They released four albums, two of which went platinum. They starred in an Emmy-winning Christmas special and had a massive line of merchandise, from toys to lunch boxes. It was one of the first times an ad campaign became a bigger star than the product it was selling.
Ivory Soap’s “99 44/100% Pure” slogan was a marketing masterstroke
Back in the late 1800s, soap was often a harsh, inconsistent product. Procter & Gamble had a new, gentle white soap they called Ivory. But how could they convince people it was better?
Harley Procter, son of one of the founders, decided to use science—or at least, the appearance of it. He sent a sample of Ivory soap to an independent lab for analysis to prove it was purer than its competitors.
The results came back showing only a tiny amount of impurities—just 56/100 of one percent. Procter brilliantly subtracted that from 100 and created one of the most memorable slogans of all time: “99 44/100% Pure”.
The slogan was genius because it sounded so precise and scientific. In an era of wild, exaggerated ad claims, it gave Ivory an air of trustworthiness and authority. It created a standard for “purity” that didn’t exist before and then declared that Ivory had met it.
It was a pioneering use of data in advertising that helped build P&G into a corporate giant.
Presidents’ Day sales were a marketing invention
You might think Presidents’ Day sales are a time-honored tradition to celebrate our nation’s leaders. In reality, the holiday shopping event was created by marketers looking to capitalize on a three-day weekend.
The holiday started in 1885 as “Washington’s Birthday,” and it was celebrated on his actual birthday, February 22. But in 1971, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act went into effect. The law moved several federal holidays to Mondays to create more long weekends for workers. A key argument for passing the bill was that it would be good for the economy and “bolster retail sales”.
Retailers immediately jumped on the opportunity. Even though Congress had rejected a proposal to officially rename the holiday, marketers started advertising “Presidents’ Day” sales to promote the new three-day weekend.
Over time, the marketing stuck. The holiday’s focus shifted from honoring George Washington to a generic celebration that now serves as a major excuse for Americans to buy mattresses and cars.
Key Takeaway
The American cultural landscape is filled with traditions, rituals, and icons that feel ancient and authentic, but many were born in the 20th century on Madison Avenue. From the way we propose marriage to the way we celebrate our parents, these “legends” are a testament to the immense power of marketing to not only sell products but to write our modern folklore.
As advertising guru Leo Burnett said, “Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief”. The stories on this list prove just how deeply those beliefs can take root.
Disclaimer – This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information. It is not intended to be professional advice.
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