MOONDEERS NOTES on Bernays' PROPAGANDA

Businesses realize that its relationship to the public is not confined to the manufacture and sale of a given product, but includes at the same time the selling of itself and of all those things for which it stands in the public mind.

Business is conscious of the public's conscience. This consciousness has led to a healthy cooperation. Today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public. To make customers is the new problem.

Business must express itself and its entire corporate existence. It must dramatize its personality and interpret its objectives in every particular in which it comes into contact with the community (or the nation) of which it is a part.

The public relations activities of a business cannot be a protective coloring to hide its real aims.

Continuous interpretation is achieved by trying to control every approach to the public mind in such a manner that the public receives the desired impression, often without being conscious of it.

The businessman has become a responsible member of the social group. It is not a question of ballyhoo, of creating a picturesque fiction for public consumption.

Public opinion is no longer inclined to be unfavorable to the large business merger. It resents the censorship of business by the Federal Trade Commission.

A merger may bring into existence huge new resources, and these resources, perhaps amounting to millions of dollars in a single operation, can often fairly be said to have been created by the expert manipulation of public opinion. It must be repeated that I am not speaking of artificial value given to a stock by dishonest propaganda or stock manipulation.

I believe that competition in the future will not be only an advertising competition between individual products or between big associations, but that it will in addition be a competition of propaganda.