Home Run Marketing By Roberto Hernandez

Only after death can we become immortal. This depends on what the word ‘immortal’ means. Babe Ruth is an immortal figure in American baseball history. How come? America’s pastime, witnessed the great Ruth from the 1920’s to the late 1940’s. Babe Ruth broke records that remain unbroken until this day. People came out to see Babe play and witnessed history. The crowd drawn by Babe caught the eye of businesses. What if Ruth could sway people with his influence? Businesses used Ruth to their advantage. From endorsing products and advertisements, to having radio programs and films, Ruth appeared everywhere throughout his time. American marketing became accustomed to seeing Ruth in various products. These products helped romanticize the image of Babe Ruth even more; so much as to creating an icon that just grew in popularity with each endorsement. Ruth become a baseball legend and reflected American standard of living. The companies sought him in hopes to become medium between the consumers and producers. Ruth comes out in ads either acting as a consumer approving something, a great player in parallel with a great product, or a trustworthy person. Because of the wide variety of products Babe Ruth was persistently hired to endorse, he became part of the social tableaux, which led to his development from a normal athlete to a celebrity. Babe Ruth, in most ads was portrayed as the consumer that was satisfied with the product he was endorsing. This strategy puts Ruth in the place of a consumer who might be inhabitable about a product. Moreover, many more options for consumers came out in the market and the products Ruth endorsed wanted to become a trustworthy brand to the public, making advertising therapeutic.1 At the peak of Babe Ruth’s popularity in the 1930’s to 1940’s, the nation begins to see Ruth outside of baseball more. With the emergence of the radio and newspaper as a major distribution of information, the number of times he appeared in media increased.2 By featuring Babe Ruth on the radio and having newspaper sections about his personal life, media got more personal with Ruth. “My Friend Babe Ruth” was the name of a magazine article from “The National Weekly,” which gave readers the image that Ruth was “as likeable as a human being as he is interesting and fascinating as ball player.”3 There were various pictures on newspapers that showed the Ruth family as a happy modern American family with a good life, wearing nice clothes and always hugging and smiling.4 The containment of carnival showed Ruth’s family as an ideal American family. Products started to associate with the exemplary life Ruth had. For example, we see Ruth using branded underwear, shaving cream, candy, cigarettes, and other products that the market had to offer at the time. Products being used wanted to appeal to America’s biggest consumer market, the middle class, thus they conveyed the democracy of goods. In the Kaywoodie ad, Ruth says, “Now any man can smoke a pipe.”5 In another cigarette ad from Old Gold, Ruth is in the middle of the ad looking up as if he hit a homer and it shows in print how he was used in a “blindfold test” to conclude that Old Gold is “right off the bat as the best.”6 This was not just limited to cigarettes, the use of Ruth as an endorser was applied to various men’s products. The Barbasol ad has Ruth saying, “It gives an errorless shave and hits 1,000 in smoothness, comfort, speed.”7 Ruth’s photo and the Barbasol box are the biggest elements, followed by facts and why Barbasol is the best. Ruth describes his issues with shaving and points out to how Barbasol offers a solution. Ruth becomes the consumer here and then, through Barbasol, the civilization is redeemed.8These strategies brought Ruth to the consumer world and portrayed him as a normal Since America witnessed Ruth’s baseball accomplishments, products came along to allow fans to share that success through their products. With