Kilmer House

Behind the Johnson & Johnson name, there were three brothers:  Robert Wood Johnson, James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson.  So why isn’t the company called “Johnson & Johnson & Johnson?”  The reason is simple: even though Robert Wood Johnson had the idea for the company and led it until his death in 1910, the business is actually named after his two brothers. 

Robert Wood Johnson

Robert Wood Johnson was born in 1845 in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania and in 1861 – with two brothers already in the army during the first year of the Civil War — he became an apprentice at age 16 in Wood & Tittamer, an apothecary in Poughkeepsie, NY, belonging to his mother’s cousin. 

After learning the business, which involved mixing medicinal plasters, he moved to New York in 1864 to continue his career in the wholesale medication business.  In 1873, Robert Wood Johnson formed a medical products business with George Seabury, called Seabury & Johnson.  The relationship between the partners was not always calm, and apparently it wasn’t improved when Seabury, in a business meeting, successfully recommended hiring his younger brother.  This caused Johnson to hire his own younger brothers: Edward in 1876 and James in 1878.  Since Robert Wood Johnson had a total of five brothers, Seabury was worried that he potentially could end up employing all of them if he didn’t put his foot down.  In 1876 Robert Wood Johnson saw eminent British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister speak about antiseptic surgery, and he got the idea to start a business producing the first-ever sterile surgical dressings, an idea that became more and more attractive as disagreements with Seabury escalated. 

Here are some die stamps and an envelope from Seabury & Johnson.  The die stamps are pre-1883, when Johnson was still a partner in the firm.  Incidentally, the information on this site is mostly correct – the company eventually was acquired by Johnson & Johnson, but in 1933.  Here is another site with a little bit of Seabury & Johnson history.

(Edward Mead Johnson (L) and James Wood Johnson (R))

Early in 1886, Robert’s younger brothers, having left Seabury & Johnson, formed a new company – Johnson & Johnson — based on the idea of manufacturing sterile surgical dressings.  Edward Mead Johnson’s abilities were in advertising and sales.  Youngest brother James Wood Johnson was a gifted engineer, good at designing and building new production machinery, a skill he had honed at Seabury & Johnson.  Once Robert was free of his obligations to Seabury & Johnson, he joined the new firm, bringing his business talents, capital, and the force of his personality to get the new company off the ground.   The familiar Johnson & Johnson logo is actually based on James Wood Johnson’s handwriting, which can be seen below his photograph. 

Edward Mead Johnson became interested in products to help digestion, and in the late 1890s, he left the Company to head the American Ferment Company, which made a product that helped infants who were unable to digest milk.  In 1905 he changed the name to Mead Johnson & Company.  The Johnson brothers knew something about starting successful businesses, because over 100 years later, Mead’s company (which has no connection with Johnson & Johnson) is still going strong too.
 

Johnson & Johnson always has understood the importance of advertising, and some of its campaigns have made their way into popular culture.  The earliest one of these was a pre-World War I ad campaign for kidney plasters, with the line “Feels Good On The Back.”   Unlike most ads of the time, which contained long explanations of the product’s benefits, the ad just said “Feels Good On The Back,” with the product name and a very soothing image of a young couple looking out to sea, with his arm around her waist.  The ad immediately struck a chord with people, and the Company was flooded with requests for reprints.  Poster-size copies of the ad were soon in drugstore windows everywhere, and people even sent in versions of the ad that they had drawn themselves, which were reprinted in the Company magazine.  The ad ran for 30 years, and was only updated once, to modernize the young woman’s clothing — which led to complaints from people who wanted the ad exactly the way it always had been!  Consumers were free to use their own imaginations to picture the couple’s faces.  And during a time of rapid change and uncertainty in the early part of the 20th century, the picture radiated a sense of calm, comfort and peacefulness that people found very appealing.

Most people probably think that the desire to have whiter teeth is one of those distinctly modern self-improvement obsessions.  But apparently people wanted whiter teeth 100 years ago too…and Johnson & Johnson made something to fill that need.  In the late 1800s, Johnson & Johnson made a tooth cream called Zonweiss, which means “white teeth” in German.  It was advertised by a poem that began:  “When pearly rows of Teeth are seen/In beauty glistening white and clean…”  Zonweiss was packaged in small jars and sold in drugstores or by mail order.  Consumers applied it to their toothbrushes with a small spoon that came with each jar.  Zonweiss was advertised in major magazines of the day, including Harper’s Magazine.  The picture with this post shows a Zonweiss ad — with hat-wearing bears using the product! — and the above-mentioned poem about how white it could make teeth.

Unfortunately, despite the catchy ads, and despite the fact that the Company offered druggists a very popular clock as a promotion, the product never quite caught on.  It was eventually repackaged in what was said to be the first squeezable toothpaste tube, but even that couldn’t keep it on the market.  Today, this ad is one of the few reminders of the product’s existence.

One of the most famous Johnson & Johnson ad campaigns didn’t even talk about the product. The ad campaign was for MODESS® sanitary napkins. In the early part of the 20th century, women’s sanitary protection was a notoriously tricky product category to advertise, and the brand had not been doing well. Here’s what an older ad looked like:

General Robert Wood Johnson, the son of Company founder Robert Wood Johnson, was chairman of Johnson & Johnson at that time. General Johnson liked to attend advertising strategy meetings, and he suggested the Company link its new ad campaign to high fashion, and make it completely different than anything seen before. So the product director and the agency hired the top fashion houses to design gowns to be used exclusively for the ads, and used top fashion photographers to take pictures of famous models wearing the gowns in exotic locations, such as palaces and art museums. But the Company still was confronted with the fact that women just didn’t like reading ads about sanitary protection. When it came time to write the advertising copy, the story goes that General Johnson said to use as few words as possible, like a sentence, or a phrase…or maybe just two words, and he suggested “MODESS®…because.” (Most ads of the era tended to be pretty wordy, so the MODESS® ads really stood out.) The ad campaign was a huge hit and sales soared. It was later recognized as one of the hundred all-time great advertisements. Why did it work so well? Probably because it spoke to the readers’ aspirations, and they could fill in their own reasons for buying a product they didn’t want to read about.