Before pixels, before algorithms, before television even existed, one man formalized most of the mechanisms that still sell today. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and the self-proclaimed father of public relations, spent his career demonstrating one thing: you don't persuade people with arguments, you persuade them with contexts. His body of work raises real ethical questions, he worked for the tobacco industry, and we'll come back to that. But two of his strategies are so fundamental that the best-performing DTC brands of 2026 still apply them, often without knowing where they come from. Here they are, with their modern playbook.
Strategy 2: sell the identity, not the product
In 1929, smoking in public was socially forbidden for women. The American Tobacco Company was losing half the market. Bernays didn't praise the taste of cigarettes: he organized, at New York's Easter parade, a group of women lighting their "torches of freedom" in front of photographers tipped off in advance. Smoking became an act of emancipation. The product hadn't changed; what it meant had.
The principle: people don't buy what the product does, they buy what the product says about them.
It's the most powerful and most badly copied mechanism in modern marketing:
- Gymshark never sold fabric: the brand sold membership in a generation building itself at the gym, with its athletes, its meetups and its codes. The leggings are the membership card.
- Quebec brands that break through do the same at their scale: you don't just wear a locally made coat, you display that you support local.
How to apply it this year:
- Answer the identity question. Complete the sentence from your customer's point of view: "People like me, who [value], choose [your brand]." If you can't complete it, your marketing is selling features, and features get compared on price.
- Name the camp. An identity needs an "us" and, often, a "them": craftsmanship versus mass production, local versus imported, custom versus one-size-fits-all. Your positioning is that fight, not your spec sheet.
- Give people gestures of belonging. Shareable content, community, events, brand-specific language: identity is practiced, not proclaimed.
- Same ethical guardrail. Bernays used this lever to sell cigarettes to women by talking about freedom. The mechanism is neutral; what you do with it isn't. Selling an honest identity around a product that keeps its promises is positioning. The rest is manipulation, and markets always make it pay eventually.
The common thread
Both strategies converge on the same lesson: context beats message. Bernays never asked "what should we say?" but "who should say it, and in what situation?". A hundred years later, with all our measurement tools, that's still the question separating brands people listen to from brands that shout.
FAQ
Who was Edward Bernays? An American publicist and theorist (1891-1995), Freud's nephew, considered the father of modern public relations. Author notably of "Propaganda" (1928), he formalized the use of social psychology in mass persuasion.
Are these techniques ethical? The mechanisms are neutral; their use isn't. The modern line is clear: disclosed partnerships, authentic testimonials, a product that keeps its promises. Used that way, these strategies structure honest positioning.
Which one should an SMB start with? Third-party authority, almost always: it requires less creative investment and pays faster (reviews, case studies, niche partnerships). Selling identity is a longer brand project, but it's the one that protects your margins long term.
Want to identify which of these two levers your brand is missing? Book a call