Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and this week we are looking at one of the biggest
deceptions in marketing history! I don't think you would get away with this today
and yet somehow they did and kind of still do. I'm sure if you've been to the store you
would have seen some Betty Crocker frosting or baking mixes or maybe you've even bought
one of the 75 million copies of cookbooks that they've sold over the years. She's
been described as an icon and one of the most recognizable American women of all time and
if you Google Betty Crocker one of the top searches is is Betty Crocker still alive?
The answer to that question is no not because she died she simply never lived. You see Betty
Crocker is not a real person she was made up. So how did the flour company that invented her fool
the world into thinking that she was real? Well it all started back in 1921 when the Washburn
Crosby Company placed this ad in the newspaper for their Gold Medal Flour the ad was a puzzle and if
you completed the puzzle which wasn't that easy and then sent it in they would mail you this cute
little flour sack pin cushion to keep all your sewing pins handy. Thousands of people completed
that puzzle and sent it in but what they weren't expecting was hundreds of them also wrote a letter
asking questions about baking bread and cake and biscuits. Now the vice president thought that it
would be more credible if the answers to those questions were signed by a woman rather than
a men. So they invented a name Crocker after the Vice President and Betty because it sounded
cozy. The ladies at the company each made up a Betty Crocker signature and the best looking
one was chosen. The other girls in the office were taught how to forge the new Betty Crocker
signature and that is the same one that is still used today. As well as replying to letters Betty
also started appearing in newspaper columns and magazine articles recommending recipes. Within a
few years Betty was so popular that they had to employ 21 home economists to test and invent new
recipes and to reply to letters and they even started traveling the country and doing cooking
demonstrations. At this time radios were becoming more affordable so many housewives had access to
one. So in 1924 the Betty Crocker cooking school of the year started broadcasting from Minneapolis.
It was the very first radio cooking show. So here she is, your Betty Crocker...
Today I'm going to give you a menu for the sort of home
meal that every bride ought to know how to prepare
for her husband. Of course when you think of preparing a meal that will go to a man's heart
you think of steak, for all men seem to love steak. The whole show is actually an advert
paid for by the flour company. I know it doesn't sound like an advert but that's because back then
there were no laws that said that broadcasters had to clearly differentiate between ads and
editorial content. So it ran more like a show. It was on at 10am (oops, 10.45am) every day and
Betty would do an interview or she would read a letter from one of her people who've written
into her and share a story and then she would go through a recipe and somewhere in there she would
promote Gold Medal Flour. A couple of years later and NBC started broadcasting so Betty's show or
should I say advert started going national. Now from the letters that were coming into
Betty the flour company found out that women at home were feeling insecure and anxious and
under-appreciated. So the show really focused on being positive and encouraging and uplifting and
praising women for the work that they were doing at home. They even interviewed husbands who were
admiring towards their wives and saying positive things and the show was a hit. In 1928 the company
was bought out by General Mills and they also with that got the ownership of Betty. Now up
until this point some of the pictures of Betty in adverts had had some confusing differences
they weren't exactly the same. So they hired an artist to paint a portrait of Betty that they
could use in all future advertising. She wore a white shirt and bright red jacket red lipstick
and perfectly styled hair. They also drew up a Betty Crocker policy for the copywriters which
stated anything that Betty Crocker said must be dignified friendly but not intimate. She
is to stick to home economics and not discuss her private life and Betty should say we not I
because it would be unsound to represent Betty as a superwoman who thinks up all her own recipes.
I had to laugh at that because it's unsound to represent her as someone who could come
up with all her own recipes but it's okay to pretend she's real when she doesn't exist.
Even the people who were doing tours of the factory at the time when people asked if they
could see Betty Crocker they were told to say she's not in today. Which is technically true
she was never in and if someone asked for a photo of Betty they were to say Betty didn't like having
her photo taken. In 1939 the horrors of World War II began. There were food shortages and many
countries around the world introduced rationing in order to try and stretch the limited food supply
to everyone so nobody missed out. My mum still has a ration book from World War II. Her parents would
hand in these coupons to get a limited amount of meat eggs fats cheese bacon and sugar to last for
a whole week. The other items were rationed using a point system. The war office in the U.S asked
General Mills to donate Betty's time and NBC to donate airtime to make a show that would encourage
women on how they could use their limited food supply to make recipes and meals for their family.
Along with the show there was also seven million copies of the Betty Crocker wartime ration recipe
booklet that was distributed to people. By the start of 1945 Betty Crocker was described as one
of the most famous women in the U.S, second only to the first lady! She was receiving
4000 letters a day and had got 10 marriage proposals amongst them 😳 The letters being
sent in were no longer just about baking bread and biscuits and cakes, people thought that
Betty was a real person and they were riding in to confide in her to ask her questions and to
tell her about their problems. One real letter read: Oh Betty Crocker I suppose I shouldn't be
pouring my heart out to you but one always feels better getting their troubles off their chests
and some things just can't be told even to one's best friend ... Then in April of 1945,
24 years after Betty was created Fortune Magazine ran an article which exposed the fact that Betty
was not real it said Betty was just a creation of General Mills. It said that she had no body that
she was purely imaginary and that General Mills had spent 10 million dollars synthesizing Betty
Crocker with radio programs and advertisements. $10 million back in 1945 is equivalent to $167
million dollars today so that's a that's a pretty decent advertising budget that they have put into
Betty Crocker. Now that magazine was only read by one percent of the population at the time and if
that was now obviously it just would have spread all over the internet in a day and I imagine Betty
Crocker would have been canceled but back then news spread a lot more slowly so General Mills
was able to control the release of the information themselves and they started running ads that said
meet the real Betty Crocker, all 21 of her. And they had photos and qualifications of all the
women who worked in the home ec department at General Mills and we also have to remember that
this article came out when the war was still going so for a lot of people that would put this into
a different perspective. Like who cares if Betty Crocker's made up I want to know if my loved ones
are going to come home safely from the war or not they had bigger things to worry about. The timing
could also explain some people's reaction to the news which was well at least if she's not real she
can die she'll always be around for us. So people either seem to accept it or they didn't actually
know about it certainly the radio show continued and the printouts continued and adverts like this
one on TV with Betty dressed in red seemed to be trying to keep up the illusion. The time was
right for further experimentation. Betty Crocker and her staff had already given years of service
to Homemakers. From these months and months of testing a new home method was developed.
As a final check the recipes for this new Betty Crocker method were sent to hundreds of Homemakers
from coast to coast. Employees at the test kitchen said that when they did tours people were often
heartbroken to find out that Betty Crocker wasn't there and they stared in disbelief when they were
told that she was not a real person. They said they had to have lots of boxes of tissues on hand
for all the tears. So obviously the news didn't get to everyone. In 1950 the Betty Crocker picture
cookbook was released with record-breaking sales of nearly 1 million copies which shows just how
well the long-running radio show or should I say advert worked at building the persona of
Betty Crocker. I don't imagine that a cookbook with General Mills on the cover would have
sold quite so well but that's exactly what it is it's a General Mills cookbook cleverly marketed.
A survey done by General Mills at the time said that 99 of American Housewives recognized the name
Betty Crocker because of its successful marketing strategy several other companies jumped onto the
bandwagon and made up their own pretend person to be in their home economics department like
Mary Blake for Carnation or Patricia Collier for Dole. But they didn't have 20 years of advertising
budget behind them so they quickly faded. Now by this time television was gaining traction and most
of the people who'd had a successful radio show now had a TV show so General Mills had an actress
Adelaide Hawley Cumming who actually didn't like cooking to be Betty Crocker on the Betty Crocker
television show. Hello everybody. Adelaide's real name was of course not mentioned in the show but
it didn't even appear on the credits and strangely she never cooked in the show they just had her
sitting behind a desk with the Betty Crocker label and then when it was time to demonstrate
a recipe they went over to one of the other Home economists Ruth who would demonstrate how
to cook it. The show flopped and then they tried another variation of a show which also flopped,
so they gave up on the TV show and just had Adelaide doing ads instead. The first Betty
Crocker cake mixers had been launched a little while ago but they were not selling very well.
After years of Betty talking up baking a cake is an accomplishment an achievement and something
to be proud of now trying to advertise here's a cake mixer just chuck in the water and it's
easy you get a perfect cake anyone can do it it kind of takes out that sense of pride and
achievement in what you've done. So they met with some psychologists and they recommended letting
the women add their own eggs so they felt like they were still part of the process of making it.
So General Mills and other companies did exactly that they took out the powdered eggs and let you
add your own and two of your own fresh eggs. Those fresh eggs keep it moist and tender to the last
crumb. And it worked people started buying cake mixes and lots of them. I actually think nowadays
some people would appreciate being able to just add water so maybe they could do an update there.
By 1960 Betty Crocker had disappeared from the TV and from Radio altogether but you could still
see her in print ads and her signature on the logo of things. Her portrait has been
updated many times over the years always with the iconic Red Jacket brown hair and blue eyes
until the most recent brown-eyed Betty and amazingly more than a hundred years on and
many people still assume that Betty Crocker was a real person and Google: is she still alive?
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