Listerine? No thanks. Looks like it started out as a floor cleaner, among others.
According to
Freakonomics:[SUP]
[4][/SUP]
[TABLE="class: cquote"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 20, align: left"][/TD]
[TD]Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as powerful surgical antiseptic.
It was later sold, in distilled form, as both a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn't a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "
chronic halitosis"— a then obscure medical term for
bad breath. Listerine's new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate's rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in spite of
that?" one maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered such a catastrophe. But Listerine changed that. As the advertising scholar
James B. Twitchell writes, "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis." In just seven years, the company's revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]