Was she the first to say it?

I’m rereading Pat Foster’s book on the Nash Metropolitan, written in 1996. The book prominently features an interview with Evelyn Ay, Miss America in 1954. She was the official ambassador for the Ambassador and the official revealer of the Metropolitan.

From my previous item on the subject:

Transcribing the corporate part:

The relationship with Nash Motors was one of the finest relationships, and I’ve had a lot of commercial relationships in the 40 years since.

I, as Miss America, was always treated very genuinely. I was not a ‘product’.

What allowed me to see much of America [she traveled 270,000 miles in that year] was Nash. If a community had a celebration and they could not afford the small price of bringing Miss America, Nash would say ‘I will bring Miss America to your community’, and they would pay the fee.

I was not a product.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

The customer is the product is thoroughly familiar now, but in 1996 the broad-based commercial Web didn’t exist yet. It was in transition from twenty years of tech-insider BBS and Compuserve. Many companies listed their email address along with their phone number. Only a few had websites, and social media hadn’t started yet. Treating the customer as a product was NOT a common saying then.

Was she the first to use the phrase? Possibly the first in the business world. I’ve read a LOT of old books on salesmanship and watched a lot of old sales training films. Salesmen considered the customer as means to an end, but the end was selling a product TO the customer, not using the customer AS the product.

Treating people as products WAS a common criticism of education in the ’50s and before. A quick lookup found these in a 1911 edition of the journal Science:

In the last analysis the usefulness of a university is the measure of its mental, moral and spiritual product – and product interpreted as broadly as you please.

The nature of the preparation of our graduate students is also a factor in our product.

So: Before 2010 people were seen as products only in education, not elsewhere. Thus Evelyn’s observation was original in the business context, and couldn’t have been influenced by modern criticism of social media.