How Ingenious Marketing Made Band-Aid a Household Name Around the World
Daven Hiskey of Today I Found Out looked at the ingenious marketing that made Band-Aid a highly recognizable household name, first within the United States and then around the world. Hiskey noted how this seemingly simple invention came about when attentive husband Earle Dixon created a simple way to tend to his accident prone wife Josephine. The idea was sold to Johnson & Johnson in 1921, and the rest, as they say, is history
Wven the simplest inventions have to come from somewhere, and surprisingly the idea of the self-adhesive bandage is only a little over a century old. The story of how this simple idea went from home remedy to household name is one of a klutzy housewife, a devoted husband, tireless innovation, and clever marketing.
The Band-Aid brand became so popular that it became a byword for all adhesive bandages and even the name for a British charitable supergroup during the 1980s.
A staple of every first aid kit, Band-Aids are a quick and convenient solution to all the minor cuts, scrapes, burns and other boo-boos life can dish out. Indeed, so fully have these little sticking-plasters permeated popular culture that the brand lent its name to the 1984 charity supergroup behind the hit song “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” while the term “band-aid solution” has entered the lexicon as a byword for temporary, often slapdash repairs
