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In 1912, the Procter and Gamble Company introduced Crisco, a solid vegetable shortening that was created in the lab and advertised as a replacement for the usual animal fats. P&G then turned from product development to the creation of a coordinated marketing strategy that would actually achieve a share for Crisco. Thus, P&G could not rely upon its own experience, but selected the collective practice of using national marketers. Over the next seventy-five years, marketers developed more sophisticated techniques employing technologies and systems undreamed of in 1912. However, the Crisco campaign was strikingly similar to campaigns of today. In the emerging culture of the early 20th century, society began to organize the mass production and marketing of consumer goods. Consumer needs developed along with products, and new ways of life began to characterize urban industrial society. Manufacturers operated on the innovative principle that demand could be created by using certain techniques to control people's desires.In 1910, Thomas Edison criticized selling and distribution, highlighting the thousands of "unwieldy" small stores and old fashioned distribution practices based more on community relationships than on efficient systems for moving merchandise from the factory to the home. Nonetheless, by 1910 three genuinely new merchandising forms-the department store, the mail-order house, and the chain store had already developed. They created new merchandising techniques that could be called mass distribution and immediately threatened traditional methods.