Marketing experts sometimes ask me questions. They are testing to see what neurolingusitics will get me to conform to their predetermined set of demographics in order to sell me something. Almost always, they succeed only in testing my patience.
My personality traits aside, it is most interesting to know that modern marketing was invented in 1918 by Vladimir Lenin.
Few greater historical ironies can be imagined than the fact that Soviet propaganda under Lenin’s direction invented modern marketing practices and set the standards for capitalist marketing campaigns.
Lenin wanted to sell communism to the people of Russia and found an absolutely unique way to do so. Using simple slogans and catch phrases, he made the "product" promise people happiness specific to their individual mindset and paradigms of social position. He employed the best artists, copyists, designers, and put them to the task of making communism appear as the most beautiful and desirable thing in the world. The brand had an official color (red), an official logo (the five-pointed star and the hammer and sickle), and the image of its leaders (Lenin, Marx). Once they established the super brand, they designed campaigns for the product lines they carried.
Soon afterward, the Soviet's main competitor in Europe, Adolph Hitler, employed the same methods, adding brilliant use of emerging technologies (including television: Hitler was the first person to appear on a public television broadcast when he announced the opening of the Olympics in Berlin in 1933. The Nazis also had television parlors, where people were sitting in relative comfort and luxury, while being brainwashed with corporate propaganda selling the brand of the Nazi Party. The people being brainwashed were too amazed by the novelty of the technology to understand what was being done to them.)
US based corporations like Westinghouse and Chrysler hired some of Lenin's marketing strategists to instruct them on their marketing methods.
The KGB, the SS, and the like were the ultimate "brand police" at the time. Like Anslinger's racist campaign against cannabis on behalf of Randolph Herst, they essentially eliminated the competition for the product they were selling by making the competing product illegal.
Lenin's project failed because communism does not work as an economic system. Some impressive achievements aside (largely in the area of space exploration), the Soviet communism failed to deliver the promises it made to its people. Products based in political ideology always fail to live up to the promises of its marketing campaigns.