When Hugh Hefner launched Playboy in 1953, the Chicago publication and the lifestyle it depicted danced around one another in an innovative business relationship. Which supported which?
Hefner knew. His social impact through the brand he created, sustained and embodied left its bunny-shaped impression on how business considers innovation and brand, and even arguably how American society developed in the late 20th century.
With the Playboy Bunny, Hefner created a cultural icon that had its own life on T-shirts and key chains. He defied racial boundaries in the ’60s by hiring black performers in Playboy clubs.
But ultimately, he presented a view of personal life — emphasizing choice instead of duty — that was at odds with the era in which he offered it, but which grew so commonplace with time and Hefner’s encouragement that it menaced the very brand he’d built around the idea.
In essence, Playboy went mainstream — or rather, mainstream went Playboy.
In her 2009 book “Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America,” Loyola University Chicago associate history professor Elizabeth Fraterrigo writes that Hefner’s interest in the good life, sexual liberation and high living “propelled his magazine into mainstream debates about society, economics and culture in postwar America.”
Among other things, she told Blue Sky, it convinced men in the 1950s to buy the expensive things Playboy tucked between racy fantasy photos, which opened the door to a lot of selling later.
“The combination helped to legitimize the sexual content of the magazine, but as importantly, promoted and validated consumerism for men,” Fraterrigo said. “Playboy’s success helped open the floodgates (to) a sex-saturated media, popular culture, and pornography. Playboy served as an important force in the ascendance of a postwar consumer ethic.”
From that perspective, Hefner’s innovation was in knowing his customers, knowing where they aspired to go and knowing just how far they’d go with a nudge.
Though it was a men’s magazine in a man’s world, Fraterrigo also noted that it still had a message for women at the time. Fraterrigo said Playboy and Hefner scorned traditional domestic roles, affirmed women’s rights to enjoy sex outside of marriage and supported women’s reproductive freedom, each of which led Hefner to write with a straight face in a 2002 Esquire column that “‘I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism.'”
Playboy’s brand went worldwide, but its beginnings and its heart remained Midwestern. Hefner was born and raised in Chicago. He moved to California, but for most of its life, the magazine was published in Chicago, not Los Angeles and not New York.
To business theorists, Hefner was a pioneering innovator in a field that took decades to name: He was a “brand champion,” wrote Susan Gunelius, author of “Build Brand Value the Playboy Way.”
Gunelius wrote that Playboy taught marketers to preserve a brand through attacks from all directions, in increasingly competitive markets, and among jaded consumers. It was a lesson, Gunelius wrote, that applied to Johnson & Johnson after the Tylenol tampering case, Martha Stewart Living magazine after Stewart did time and Exxon and BP after major oil spills.
But of course, it was also about sex, on a mass-consumption scale. Pornography was a lightning rod even then, but it wasn’t a label universally applied to Playboy.
As Hefner and Taschen Publishing released in 2009 a six-volume, 56th anniversary illustrated “Playboy” anthology, The New York Times reported that “as a magazine publisher, [Hefner] essentially did for sex what Ray Kroc did for roadside food: clean it up for a rising middle class.”
