Q: Who invented body odor? A: Advertising men.

This is an interesting article in which historian, Stuart Ewen, depicts the historical development of body odor products and their very profitable marketing advertisement campaigns launched in the early 1900s, aimed at manipulating social consciousness regarding BO. This marketing strategy targeted the very social perception of odor and "played heavily on fears" about how others would react to a halitosis sufferer.

Using headlines such as, "Would you have told him the truth?" and "[Edna]...Often a bridesmaid but never a bride", they managed to take an already "delicate subject" and brought it to the limelight to offer their products as the solution to this undesirable curse. Ewen notes, "... [advertisers] tried to endow people with a 'critical self-consciousness' directed especially at their personal appearances."

In the 1910s and particularly the 1920s, advertising agents focused their attention on identifying—and often inventing—personal anxieties that could be resolved by the purchase of specific products...In response to the ad campaign, Listerine sales went from $100,000 per year in 1921 to more than $4 million in 1927. Meanwhile, the strategy of ads as “quick-tempo socio-dramas in which readers were invited to identify with temporary victims in tragedies of social shame,” writes historian Roland Marchand, led to a new “school of advertising practice.”

http://chnm.gmu.edu/features/sidelights/whoinventedbo.html