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Imaginative marketing Posts
Imaginative marketing from the 1890’s
June 17th, 2009
I just found the following story and wanted to share it with you. It is quite funny in a macabre way and very poignant.
It shows just how innovative the Victorians and their contemporaries were in tackling marketing challenges.
Back in the early days of electricity, electrical companies were very imaginative marketers.
In the 1890’s Edison was marketing ‘direct current’ (DC) and Westinghouse was marketing ‘alternate current’ (AC).
Their battle was the first format war – the precursor of VHS vs Betamax or HDDVD vs BlueRay.
Edison know that consumers were frightened of electricity and played on this insight to differentiate his brand.
To prove that the competitive AC was dangerous, Edison gave a series of demonstrations of its lethal power.
He publicly electrocuted dogs and cats.
And then he filmed the AC electrocution of Topsy, a Coney Island elephant (which is apparently available for us all to see on YouTube).
Meanwhile, his employee Harold Brown invented an even more compelling demonstration of the lethal power of AC for the State of New York. He invented the electric chair.
The utility companies of today are far less imaginative marketers.
Dual fuel packages and discounts for automated payments don’t exactly capture the public imagination.