this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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Listerine was a cleaning product until they decided to boost sales by positioning it as a mouthwash.
First, they had to convince everyone that they needed mouthwash, so they invented HALITOSIS (bad breath), and then offered Listerine as the solution.
Lysol tried a similar pivot, except they tried to market their cleaning product as post-sex birth control douche. Listerine's pivot caught on, Lysol's didn't.
Halitosis was already the medical term for bad breath, with evidence of its use in England. All that word did was give an American businessman/marketer a polite euphemism to talk about something that was considered taboo at the time (body odors were associated with poor hygiene and lower status people). It does seem like they pushed hard with marketing to make it into a more widespread "problem" though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160712170405/http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/thanks-to-chemistry/listerine.aspx
do... do you think bad breath is made up???
No, I meant that they created a demand by marketing up Halitosis like it's a major problem.
That's nothing new, they still do it constantly. Those women's deodorant commercials make women feel like they are carrying a cloud of funk around with them wherever they go, and they have to smear this deodorant over every inch of their bodies or they'll offend every nasal passage in the county.
Before you can offer a solution, you need to make them feel like they have a terrible problem that needs to be fixed immediately, at any cost. Even if you have to make it up.