Brownie Wise, Tupperware Queen: A Biography
By Fergus Mason
5/5
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About this ebook
In 1950 a saleswoman living in Florida decided to find a fun new way to market an unexciting product – reusable food containers. She already had plenty of experience selling household goods but now she wanted to try something different, and she was after a quirky, lively way to sell things.
The solution she chose was being used to sell brushes in the USA by the late 1930s, but now it’s spread throughout the entire world and been adapted to a wide range of different products. Mostly that’s because it was made famous by Brownie Wise and Tupperware. Yes, Tupperware isn’t very exciting, but what could be more fun than a party?
This is the remarkable story of Brownie Wise.
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Reviews for Brownie Wise, Tupperware Queen
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A good overview of how one lady through her enthusiasm carried direct selling to higher heights.
Book preview
Brownie Wise, Tupperware Queen - Fergus Mason
LifeCaps Presents:
Brownie Wise, Tupperware Queen:
A Biography
By Fergus Mason
© 2011 by Golgotha Press, Inc./LifeCaps
Published at SmashWords
www.bookcaps.com
About LifeCaps
LifeCaps is an imprint of BookCaps™ Study Guides. With each book, a lesser known or sometimes forgotten life is recapped. We publish a wide array of topics (from baseball and music to literature and philosophy), so check our growing catalogue regularly (www.bookcaps.com) to see our newest books.
Introduction
Marketing. It’s ubiquitous and getting more so every year. We’re constantly bombarded with sales messages, from ads on the subway, through internet popups and the constant barrage of commercials on TV. A lot of people have made fortunes selling ways to keep spam out of your email inbox, and a huge advantage of DVRs is they let you record your favorite TV shows then play them back without the high-pressure sales segments. Some of us hate marketing more than others, but pretty much everyone wishes they were exposed to less of it. Politicians and academics have boosted their careers studying, or complaining about, the influence of marketing on lifestyles and health. Marketing is a nuisance.
But at the same time it’s also valuable. Since the late 19th century the choice of consumer goods has been expanding, especially since the US industrial boom that followed the Second World War, and this growth is showing no signs of slowing down. In fact if anything it’s increasing. This means we’re all faced with constant decisions about what to buy – whether we should be buying most of it at all is a different issue – and good marketing can help us make those decisions. A lot of the time it’s heavily slanted but it can be informative; it’s fair to say we’re better having some of it than none at all. The tricky bit is finding the right balance, and it would also be nice if marketing got delivered in a way that didn’t annoy people quite so much.
That last factor, making advertising more acceptable to its target audience, has driven a lot of innovation and attracted some very creative people to the industry. There have been failures, of course, and unsolicited commercial email
is probably the worst, but a few successes as well. Viral videos are a recent one. These clips, often with a subversive air of fun, nudge consumers towards a particular product - but to achieve wide distribution they rely on the fact most people like them. That’s economical for the advertiser because instead of paying for expensive air time or space they get the target audience to do the work for them, but it also reduces the irritation factor. People aren’t being bombarded with junk by faceless corporations. They’re being sent a funny video by a friend.
Viral marketing is a child of the digital age but the basic principle behind it – making marketing fun – is a lot older. It might go all the way back to the Roman arenas, where gladiators advertised brands of olive oil to the crowd as they buffed their muscles with it, but it certainly existed by the post-WWII period and it took suburban America by storm in the early 1950s. How did that happen?
In 1950, a successful saleswoman living in Florida decided to find a fun new way to market an unexciting product: reusable food containers. She already had plenty of experience selling household goods but now she wanted to try something different, and she was after a quirky, lively way to sell things. The solution she chose was being used to sell brushes in the USA by the late 1930s, but now it’s spread throughout the entire world and been adapted to a wide range of different products. Mostly that’s because it was made famous by Brownie Wise and Tupperware. Yes, Tupperware isn’t very exciting, but what could be more fun than a party?
Chapter 1
In the rural USA in 1913, most women didn’t have jobs. That’s not to say they didn’t work hard – housekeeping was a far bigger task without today’s labor-saving appliances, and women living on a farm would do their share when the crops had to come in – but not many of them got up every morning, fixed breakfast then went out to an office or factory. It was a bit different in towns though, even a small one like Buford, Georgia. Some women did go out to work, often in garment making or similar industries. Rosabelle Stroud Humphrey was one of them. Her husband Jerome was