The First Marketing Office

It was truly She who taught us how to sell. The first thing was to put three pieces on the body. Trousers, jacket and tie of the period. And, before anything else, clean. Pleasant to look at and clean-shaven. And there, there was no doubt: they took a well-sharpened stone and called it GILLETTE.

Man immediately stiffened. He felt betrayed by this name. Perhaps an unknown lover. But she, with her calm, reassured him and said: it is the name of one who will arrive, and he will never make history, because he will be history. What nobody knows is that he will be together with the one who will have had the courage to tell it.

Then he immediately found peace. She was not a figure to be believed in. She was believable. She was the origin. And one day the name of “mother” was born.

Her children have made so much noise in the world over these millennia, and only a few have truly succeeded. But she was the true publicist. The unmistakable medium inside a direction that is inimitable. And all sales came only from this one phenomenon: woman.

Many have asked me over the years what is the best-selling product in the world. I had no doubt. It was the word.

The example of this is a colleague from two thousand years ago. Sponsored by his mother, he started out from a stable, and later, once he became an adult, he left his home and went around the world in a blue robe, clean-shaven.

But cinema chose to always represent him in a white robe, with a half-thick beard, so as not to give free advertising to Gillette and its logo.

Even his twelve colleagues, whom he had hired in his first marketing office, were not Harvard graduates. They all had little schooling. But he had understood one thing right away: a good salesman must sell the idea before the product, and give the perception that it is free, so that immune and economic defenses lower themselves and the rest follows on its own.

These twelve fishermen, too, were all clean-shaven. They all used the same product, which had the distinctive quality of never running out with its sharp edge, and was only changed when mother needed to shave her legs. But because of this non-advertising, cinema in this case too represented them all with beards.

I took the trouble to investigate why the Majors did this, and a crazy story came out of it that I want to tell you. The trade associations representing hair — barbers, hairdressers, beauticians — had shown serious concern for their businesses. If they had put, in the film about the colleague from two thousand years ago, a Gillette blade, or everyone clean-shaven, they would no longer have been able to justify their positions, and would have found themselves unemployed.

Think if one day there were no more sick people. What would doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies do?

Maybe they would all go to work at Gillette, and learn what a blade can do, seen from more angles.