Creating Business Magic. David Morey
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all fairness to County Chemicals’ hair product—introduced in 1928 and called Brylcreem—it did not issue from the same assembly line as the laxative. It was a pomade consisting mostly of water and mineral oil held together by beeswax and dispensed from a jar—or “tub,” as the cosmetics industry calls such vessels—that fit comfortably in the palm of the adult male hand. (Today, as manufactured by Unilever, it comes in a tube.) If you are fortunate enough to be too young to recall the 1950s and 1960s television commercials for the product, several are available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube and Dailymotion.com. By the television era, Brylcreem was promoted with the jingle-borne injunction, “A little dab will do ya.” At least one TV spot earnestly cautioned that “Brylcreem has a most extraordinary effect on women. (Young, pretty girls are especially susceptible.) So once again, as a public service, we’d like to caution all serious men to use just a little dab.” This ad depicted a young fellow enduring the caresses of a mildly assaultive woman who just cannot keep her exploring hands out of his hair.
“This man dared to use two dabs. Now he’s in trouble!”
The thing is, anyone who has seen Tyrone Power or Cary Grant in films of the 1940s—a time when dashing pilots flying for the Royal Air Force (RAF) were called the “Brylcreem Boys”—knows that old-school users could not confine themselves to a little dab or even two little dabs. Just look at photos of our last old-school president, Ronald Wilson Reagan, a lifelong user of the product.
Advance to 1962, the year Bristol-Myers gave Vitalis to the world. This product challenged the hegemony of the Brylcreem status quo and thereby changed reality. Vitalis was radically different from Brylcreem. It came neither in a tub nor tube, but in a bottle. It was not a “hair pomade” or even a “hair dressing,” but a liquid “Hair Tonic,” charged with an essence denominated V7, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office identified as “Polyglycol for use in a hair tonic.”
We can reveal here that the current Vitalis formulation consists of SD Alcohol 40, PPG 40 Butyl Ether, water, benzyl benzoate, fragrance, dihydroabietyl alcohol, D&C Yellow 10 (CI 74005), and FD&C Yellow 6 Aluminum Lake. Whatever this formula does or does not do for human hair on the cellular or molecular level, what it did to Brylcreem is what Kryptonite does to Superman. In truth, we don’t believe it’s the SD Alcohol 40 or the FD&C Yellow 6 Aluminum Lake or any other chemical constituent of Vitalis that undermined the reign of the earlier reigning hair product. We are convinced the decline began as soon as Bristol-Myers decided to call out its incumbent rival neither by its brand name (Brylcreem) nor its generic name (pomade), but rather to redefine, revile, and dismantle it utterly by slurring it as “greasy kid stuff.”
Here’s how it worked. Both in print and on TV, the typical Vitalis ad was set in a locker room and depicted one pro athlete staring slack-jawed at the hair of a teammate. Barely suppressing a tone of contempt and nausea, athlete A demands of athlete B: “You still using that greasy kid stuff?”
Like Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” the question struck a sustained chord with the public. In bars, at work, on the very streets of America, men asked one another, “You still using that greasy kid stuff?” Through the analog Web of predigital pop culture, Vitalis advanced against Brylcreem with the speed of Patton against Rundstedt. In 1962, honky-tonk song-writer Cy Coben wrote a tune called “Greasy Kid Stuff,” giving one-hit wonder Janie Grant her single Top 40 hit, with lyrics invoking Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, Stanley and Livingston, Sampson and Delilah, and Nikita Khrushchev and JFK—all of whom, the song complained, used “greasy kid stuff.”
The following year, greasy kid stuff found its way into comedy stand-up routines and culture and became an even more embedded part of our popular consciousness.
Forget Reality, Focus on Perception
It would be fair to say that reality changed in 1962 when Vitalis transformed Brylcreem into “greasy kid stuff.” It would be fair to say, that is, if you look at the world from the magician’s perspective—reflected here in a three-word sentence: Perception is reality.
This in and of itself is hardly a fresh insight. “Perception is reality” is at least as old as Plato’s Republic, a product of the fourth century BC. In a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and Plato’s mentor Socrates, Plato (through Socrates) describes people who have lived lifelong as prisoners chained to the wall of a cave. They observe shadows projected on the wall from objects that pass in front of an unseen fire that burns behind the prisoners. The chained cave dwellers name each shadow, thereby identifying these mere shades as reality.
Now, Plato’s Socrates is trying to sell Glaucon on the benefit of becoming a philosopher. His point in presenting the cave allegory is to demonstrate that prisoners in a cave mistake shadows for reality, whereas the philosopher understands the shadows for what they are because his mind has made him the freest of all men. This has enabled him to see the world of sun and substance outside the cave.
So now we arrive at the difference between the philosopher and the magician. The philosopher scorns and rejects the shadows and what the prisoners make of them, but the magician, while he is not deceived by them, doubles down on the shadows. Philosophers reject as false a “reality” that chains prisoners to impressions received via the senses. Magicians embrace and exploit these impressions because they regard them as something more than Plato believed them to be. They are not shadow impressions passively received, but shadow impressions actively endowed with reality by the human mind.
This brings us to the reason Gustav Kuhn, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of London, argues that “magic is so well-suited to explore human cognition and perception.” It “comes down to one of the weirder facts of being human: Every experience we have in the world—everything we can see and hear and taste and feel, and everything we remember about it afterward—is in some ways virtual.” That is, our picture of reality is created in our cognitive interpretation of reality—the way in which we sort through bristling fields of ambient data to understand what’s happening to us. As Kuhn puts it, “magic happens to us all the time—our whole experience is a massive illusion, we’re just not aware of it.”4
Well, some of us—namely, we magicians—are aware. “Magicians,” Kuhn says, “are trying to find loopholes in cognition, and they’re trying to exploit those loopholes to create their illusions.”5 Vaulting from the fourth century BC to 1962 and the transformation of Brylcreem reality into greasy kid stuff reality, the magician says perception is reality, adding to that formulation the clause or might as well be. For the Platonic philosopher, nothing but reality will do. For the magician, perception is where the action is. Plato’s Platonic version of reality may or may not exist. No one knows for sure, because the only way out of the cave is to imagine a realm outside of the cave. In other words, Plato’s reality exists only in the mind when the mind is, by an act of will, isolated from the senses, those portals to the unreal (and therefore, for the philosopher, valueless) shadow realm. But the magician’s reality is perception—or might as well be—because perception is all we really know.
Another “forget reality” example. In the drawing below, a simple question: not counting the arrows, which line is longer?
Answer: both are exactly the same. This is the famous Müller-Lyer illusion referenced in Daniel Kahneman’s fascinating book, Thinking Fast and Slow. In his comprehensive work, Kahneman details dual parts of our mind, our system of perception, which he calls System I, the “faster” part of our brain that by necessity gathers information almost instantly, and System II, the “slower” and more powerful part of our mind that puts logic and reasoning to work. As we’ll see below, great magicians operate inside both these systems, but at their best, they have an innate and almost Darwinian advantage in affecting and even temporarily controlling both.6
In a similar vein, John McLaughlin gives his graduate students an image from an illusion contest held at McGill University in 2007. It is the so-called Leaning Tower illusion.7 Even though the two towers in the photographs are the same, the one seems to lean more than the other, and the eyes and brain are incapable of seeing the reality. The creators of