An angel appeared, saying: ‘Behold! The tagless T-shirt’

The Rev Lee Rayfield was rightly criticised not only for telling a congregation of small children that Santa Claus was dead but also providing the grisly details. In attempting to deliver 378 million presents to 91.8 million homes in 31 hours, said the vicar, Santa was crushed by 4 million pounds of force and his reindeer vaporised.

Nonsense, of course. The foolish preacher put his faith in science rather than in God, where it ought to repose, and we all know that science is fallible and the Almighty is not. How, for example, could science explain the miracle of the loaves and fish? How could 4,000 people be fed with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish? This remained a mystery for almost 2,000 years until Charlie Forte discovered portion control, and even now the secret is known only to a few.

Of all the abuse and misuse of science, the worst by far is the attempt to destroy the fondly held beliefs of childhood. By seeking to apply the laws of physics to the limitless vistas of the imagination, the scientists subvert what it is to be human. But they waste their time. All of us carry beliefs that are, thank heaven, obstinately impervious to the cold reasoning of science. No sooner have we shed the fables of childhood than we adopt new and apparently irrational faiths.

Some of us believe in the power of crystals and magnets, others in astrology. A great many believe in celebrity, clinging to the fanciful notion that Posh and Becks are in some indefinable way real. Millions of seemingly sane people also believe in a host of improbable things such as public opinion polls, the European Union, the beautiful game, and the Third Way. Further out on the wilder shores of imaginings, some maintain that Gregory Crap Dyke really is the director-general of the BBC. Other beliefs are on surer ground. Feminism, for instance, whose achievements it is difficult to gainsay. Back in the pre-feminist era of the mid-Fifties when rock ’n’ roll first reached these shores, cinema audiences at the Bill Haley film Rock Around the Clock peed on the seats and tore them off. Then the girls did the peeing and the boys the wrecking. Today it would be the other way round. Such is the power of belief.

It goes without saying that this column has an unshakeable belief in marketing. Let me give you one example. In the US, where economic recovery is still uncertain, where the nation has yet to recapture its self-belief after the awful events of September 11, and the prospect of war with Iraq comes ever nearer, a single marketing campaign exemplifies the unquenchable spirit of capitalism, the dominance of consumerism, and the inventive genius of marketing.

Hanes, part of the Sara Lee Corporation, has invented the tagless T-shirt. It discovered that the little labels sewn into its neckbands since 1920 irritate the skin of the wearer. That it took 80 years for this to become known says a lot both for the stoicism of the American people and the unbending faith of corporate America in ways and methods honoured by time.

And yet capitalism is nothing if not flexible. So after four decades of itching and fretting, in the dawn of the new millennium comes the tagless T-shirt. Hanes, bravely throwing tradition to the wind, has decided to print the labels onto its garments. More importantly, it is trumpeting the achievement to an admiring and grateful populace.

A multi-million dollar campaign includes television commercials, a website, billboards, coupons, publicity relations, and unusual promotions such as “retirement parties” for the tags.

“The tag is important because it’s a branding device,” explains John Ceneviva, senior vice-president for branding at Hanes & Hanes. “But it also can be a consumer annoyance. It comes right out in focus-group interviews when customers say things like ’My husband asks me to cut it out’.”

The TV commercial shows the basketball superstar Michael Jordan watching bemusedly as men wriggle, squirm and contort themselves to alleviate the irritation caused by the tags in their T-shirts. “It’s gotta be the tag,” Jordan muses, with a wisdom made credible by his athletic achievements.

Since the campaign began two months ago, sales of men’s T-shirts without tags are running 30 to 70 per cent ahead of their tagged counterparts. “I’ve only had this experience a couple of times in my life when you put a programme together and turn on the advertising, and the results are immediately visible,” says Ceneviva. “The jumps were extraordinary.”

There are many messages for us to take away from this modern miracle, not least that the “two cultures” of science and art may not only coexist but also work in harmony to the benefit of mankind. It was science that put the irritant in the T-shirt and science that took it out again. But it was art that transformed the achievement into hard sales. And somewhere in between, part science part art, was the focus group, the forum where that unknown consumer revealed that her husband had asked her to cut it out, words that were to echo through the halls of Hanes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and whip up a storm, a blizzard that blew away the T-shirt tags and made memories of itchy necks. Who says marketing isn’t wonderful?