Many years ago, I read an article in Esquire by Nora Ephron entitled “Dealing with the, uh, Problem,” about the early days of the feminine-hygiene spray business. Ephron was investigating how Alberto-Culver managed to convince women, as a rival company had done in its advertising, that her “trickiest deodorant problem isn't under her pretty little arms.”
What interested me the most about the piece was marketing strategy: create the demand for the problem to sell the solution. And back in the 1970s, promoting their invented solution as feminist, part of
