Americans who sell a house are told to improve its curb appeal. Merriam-Webster defines the phrase as “the visual attractiveness of a house as seen from the street.” It dates the first known use to 1975.
In a 2025 survey by the National Association of Realtors, 77 percent of sellers’ agents recommended improving curb appeal. Cleaning the entire home was recommended by 88 percent. Of buyers’ agents, 83 percent said that staging a home made it easier for a buyer to see it as their future home. The figures are agents’ answers, not sales records.
In 1981 the quality expert Philip Crosby wrote: “When teaching Quality Management, I always teach my students to learn an ‘elevator speech.'” He meant a short speech for the boss, ready for the length of an elevator ride. It is the earliest dated use in the researcher Barry Popik’s collection of citations.
By 1997 the business writer Tom Peters used the form “elevator pitch.” He wrote that it “isn’t really about dealing with pressure. It’s about communication. And caring.” Other origin stories, about Hollywood screenwriters and an editor at Vanity Fair in the 1990s, offer no earlier date.
In 1937 the sales trainer Elmer Wheeler published Tested Sentences That Sell. The title of its first chapter was “Don’t Sell the Steak—Sell the Sizzle!” Time magazine quoted the slogan, from a speaker for Wheeler’s firm, in August of that year. In 1938 The New Yorker quoted his explanation: “The sizzle has sold more steaks than the cow ever has, although the cow is, of course, mighty important.”
Americans also use the image as criticism. A person who is “all sizzle and no steak” seems able but gets little done. In July 2013 House Speaker John Boehner used the phrase about a speech by President Barack Obama.
At the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, judges score projects out of 100 points. Presentation is worth 35 of them: 10 for the poster and 25 for the interview with the judges. For science projects, data collection, analysis and interpretation together are worth 20.
The poster is judged on “logical organization of material” and “clarity of graphics and legends.” In the interview the judges look for “clear, concise, thoughtful responses to questions.”
On September 26, 1960, Americans watched the first televised presidential debate. Richard Nixon had recently left the hospital after a knee infection and was 20 pounds underweight. Both candidates declined the network’s makeup artist. Nixon used a drugstore powder, and under the studio lights he sweated visibly. John F. Kennedy looked tanned and ready. He won over the 70 million television viewers by a broad margin.
The story is often told with one more detail: radio listeners thought Nixon had won. That claim rests largely on one survey by Sindlinger & Company. Of more than 2,100 people asked, only 282 had listened on radio, and only 178 named a winner. In 1987 two scholars, David Vancil and Sue Pendell, judged that group too small and unrepresentative for firm conclusions.
In an experiment published in 2003, 81 percent of participants who watched the debate thought Kennedy won. Of those who only listened, 60 percent did.
In June 2019 Julia Evans advised the readers of her programming blog to keep a “brag document.” She started from a common belief. “There’s this idea that, if you do great work at your job, people will (or should!) automatically recognize that work and reward you for it with promotions / increased pay.” In practice, she wrote, “it’s often more complicated than that.”
Her advice is to write down your own work before performance reviews. “And if you don’t remember everything important you did, your manager (no matter how great they are!) probably doesn’t either.” Work that is hard to see belongs in the document too, “because it’s the most likely to fall under the radar!”
In 2003 Warner Books published Brag! The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It, by Peggy Klaus. Klaus is a communication and leadership coach who works with Fortune 500 companies.
A summary of the book describes its target as a “venerable performance myth”: “A job well done speaks for itself.” Those who believe it, the summary warns, will find that others “will never know” what they can do. According to Publishers Weekly, Klaus teaches readers to keep a “bragalogue.” This is a short story about their own achievements that they update regularly.
The United States has been growing since its birth. Growing in territory, in population, in economic output. For the most part the U.S. has striven for open markets, domestically and internationally. Americans also believe in meritocracy. People should benefit directly from their hard work.
Americans believe in competition. And America has always been a buyer‘s market, with supply outpacing demand. In such an environment, success cannot be attained without active effort to win customers. In America, sales and marketing are critical to success. Simply „building the better mousetrap“ is not enough.
An Amazon.com search on “Buyer’s Market” generates 13,959 results. Book titles include Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets by Michael T. Bosworth, The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott and Buyer Beware: Finding Truth in the Marketplace of Ideas by Janet Parshall. 10.5 percent of native-born Americans between the ages 25 and 64 are employed in the sales industry.
In 1975, Gary Dahl, a freelance copywriter, bought several smooth Mexican beach stones and began selling them in the United States as “pet rocks.” But what was initially meant as a joke soon became what Newsweek called “one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever.”
Within a few months, Dahl had sold over 1.5 million rocks. He was a guest on The Tonight Show, and at one point Gary was selling approximately 6,000 rocks per day.
The reason for his success was largely due to marketing: every pet rock came in a carrying case (with air holes), nestled on a bed of straw. Additionally, the purchase of a pet rock also bought its new owner a manual on the care, feeding, and house training of their new pet. Other factors, especially processes, were of very little importance in driving this pet trend.
Despite its name, the Current War is not happening now, but took place primarily in the late 1800s. It was a war fought between Serbian-born, American-immigrant Nikola Tesla and the American Thomas Edison.
Tesla had difficulty convincing the American public to use his alternating electric current to power their homes and businesses. Alternating current (AC) had the ability to provide electricity over long distances much better than Edison’s direct current (DC), which required power stations to be built close together.
Nevertheless, despite the demonstrable superiority of AC to the spread-out American public, Tesla had great difficulty convincing people to use his system of AC over Edison’s DC. This is because Edison was much better at marketing to the American public. He sold himself as well as his product, and also attempted to discredit AC by incorrectly claiming that it was more dangerous, which he demonstrated by publicly electrocuting stray animals using AC.
As a result of Edison’s marketing campaign DC was the standard electric current for many years. However, this began to change after George Westinghouse, an American engineer and entrepreneur, acquired Tesla’s patents for AC and the induction motor.
Westinghouse was much better at selling AC to Americans than Tesla had been, and the first major victory for Tesla’s current occurred during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, in which General Electric, using DC, bid to electrify the fair for $554,000, but lost to Westinghouse, who bid $399,000 using AC.
Shortly after this, Niagara Falls Power Company awarded Westinghouse a contract to begin harnessing the power of the waterfall for use, and on 16 Nov 1896 Buffalo, New York began to be powered by AC from Niagara Falls. General Electric also switched to AC, and it wasn’t long before AC destroyed DC. Even Edison eventually switched to the more productive AC.