A friend sent me a link that gave a number of very enduring advertising slogans. One was the famous Morton’s Salt tag line: “When it rains, it pours.”
The line refers to the fact that inferior brands of table salt clump in the shaker during rainy, humid days; presumably Morton’s does not. But, as we all know, “when it rains it pours” is also a common colloquial turn of phrase meaning when something suddenly happens, it doesn’t just start in a trickle but in a big rush.
Now, I have always thought that the popular turn of phrase was a little TOO damn perfect to fit the product attributes of non-clumping table salt. Then it occurred to me that may be tag line spawned the popular phrase and not the other way around.
One of the most successful and lasting “idea sessions” in the early days of advertising took place in 1911, shortly after the salt sales agency headed by Joy Morton was incorporated as Morton Salt Company. From a routine advertising presentation came an exchange of ideas, which resulted in the first Morton Salt Umbrella Girl and a slogan that is now recognized by most American homemakers. Back then, the company had decided to embark on the first national consumer advertising campaign for salt to promote its new product - a free-running salt in a round blue package with a paended (sic), pouring spout.
The advertising agency selected, N. W. Ayer and Company, was asked to submit a series of 12 different ads to run in consecutive issues of Good Housekeeping magazine. The agency’s account executives brought 12 proposed ads, and three possible substitutes, to the Morton offices. Sterling Morton, Joy Morton’s son, who was then secretary of the newly formed company, was immediately interested in one of the substitutes - a little girl holding an umbrella in one hand to ward off falling rain and, in the other, a package of salt tilted back under her arm with the spout open and salt running out. “Here was the whole story in a picture-the message that the salt would run in damp weather was made beautifully evident,” Mr. Morton later recalled. Still, it needed something. The planned copy which read “Even in rainy weather, it flows freely,” was appropriate but too long. “We need something short and snappy,” Sterling Morton remarked.
Suggestions came for “Flows Freely,” “Runs Freely,” and then, finally the old proverb “It Never Rains But It Pours.” When this was vetoed as being too negative, a positive rephrasing resulted in “When It Rains It Pours.” The picture of the Morton Girl and the slogan, “When It Rains It Pours,” first appeared together on the blue package of table salt in 1914.
Well, the Phrase Finder shows a proverb “It never rains but it pours” (with ‘but’ meaning “without the result that” according to this Dictionary.com link), taken to mean that when troubles come, they come in a whole big bunch.
The OED cites the phrase as proverbial in origin and in a quote from 1726; a quick search of “when”, “rain”, and “pour” in the OED yields no results for the Mortonized phrase. Obviously, further research is called for, but my hypothesis is that the Morton company tweaked the older proverb to make a clever slogan for its moisture-resistant salt, and that slogan came to replace the proverb in later years.