18 Things You Never Knew Started As Marketing Ploys

Packaged toilet paper, which consisted of pre-moistened sheets with aloe in a Kleenex-style box, wasn't introduced in America until 1857. Toilet paper on a roll as we know it today was introduced in 1890 by Clarence and E Irvin Scott, whose company Scott's is still one of the leading TP brands worldwide.

Everything about a grocery store's layout is designed to make it seem like you're spontaneously buying something that wasn't on your list. To get to the milk and bread at the back of the store, you have to pass through many other aisles of goodies. Even demonstrations and sampling carts aren't really intended to make you buy the product you taste; they're designed to slow you down and make you see all the products that are around you as you wait for your bite.

This Thanksgiving tradition didn't start in some grandmother's recipe book. It started in the marketing department of the Campbell Soup Company in 1955 when they wanted to create a recipe that would improve lagging sales of their Cream of Mushroom soup.

Legend has it that boxed cake mixes were invented after WWII when companies had too much flour, but actually they were developed in the 1930s when a Pittsburgh company, P. Duff and Sons, had too much molasses. The dehydrated gingerbread mix that it developed used 100 pounds of molasses, using up its entire supply.

When sales were lagging, the De Beers team decided to increase the median price of their sales by touting the now widely accepted rule that an engagement ring should cost what you make in two months.

Contrary to popular belief, the Miss America Pageant was not an inevitable result of American meritocracy. The Businessmen's League of Atlantic City created the event in 1921 to keep tourists coming to the boardwalk past Labor Day.

When hemlines rose starting in the '20s, companies again jumped on this new opportunity to sell grooming products by depicting leg hair on women as undesirable.

Hailed as the "holy grail" of product placement, the Oprah Winfrey Show is known for audience giveaways that equal major screen time for corporations. But audiences and executives hit the jackpot in 2004 when Oprah gave away 276 of the brand new Pontiac G6s to her audience members. Which was, of course, designed as an ad campaign for the General Motors brand's newest model.

While the process of preserving the dead goes back to ancient Egypt, the modern (and largely Western) practice of chemical embalming as it is practiced today was promoted after World War II by two chemical manufacturers that produced formaldehyde.

Until the Burroughs Wellcome company invented a drug to reduce symptoms of herpes simplex, the social stigma attached to the genital variety of this very common disease was nonexistent. In order to get people to buy their new drug, the company began an ad campaign in 1975 to create a distinction between what we now think of as "cold sores" and the socially abhorrent genital strain.