Editing Samuel Colt (section)

=== Marketing ===
When foreign heads of state would not grant him an audience, as he was only a private citizen, he persuaded the governor of the state of Connecticut to make him a lieutenant colonel and aide-de-camp of the state militia. With this rank, he toured Europe again to promote his revolvers.<ref>{{harvnb|Houze|Cooper|Kornhauser|2006|p=59}}</ref> He used marketing techniques which were innovative at the time. He frequently gave custom engraved versions of his revolvers to heads of state, military officers, and celebrities such as [[Giuseppe Garibaldi]], King [[Victor Emmanuel II of Italy]], and Hungarian rebel [[Lajos Kossuth]].<ref name=Sapp1314 /> In the earliest use of [[product placement]] advertising, Colt commissioned American frontier painter [[George Catlin]] to produce a series of paintings depicting exotic scenes in which a Colt weapon was prominently used against Indians, wild animals, or bandits.<ref>{{harvnb|Tucker|Tucker |2008|p=80}}</ref> He placed numerous advertisements in the same newspapers; ''The Knickerbocker'' published as many as eight in the same edition. He also hired authors to write stories about his guns for magazines and travel guides.<ref name=tucker /> One of Colt's more significant acts of self-promotion was a $1,120 payment ($61,439 in 1999 dollars) to the publishers of ''United States Magazine'' for a 29-page fully illustrated story showing the inner workings of his factory.<ref name=dizard66 />

After his revolvers had gained acceptance, Colt had his staff search for unsolicited news stories mentioning his guns that he could excerpt and reprint. He went so far as to hire agents in other states and territories to find such samples, to buy hundreds of copies for himself and to give the editor a free revolver for writing them, particularly if such a story disparaged his competition.<ref name=dizard66 /> Many of the revolvers Colt gave away as "gifts" had inscriptions such as "Compliments of Col. Colt" or "From the Inventor" engraved on the back straps. Later versions contained his entire signature which was used in many of his advertisements as a centerpiece, using his celebrity as a seeming guarantee of the performance of his weapons. Colt eventually secured a trademark for his signature.{{citation needed|date=April 2018}}

One of his slogans, “God created men, Col. Colt made them equal,” (claiming that any person could, regardless of physical strength, defend themselves with a Colt gun) became a popular adage in American culture.<ref>{{cite web |title=Who Made America? {{!}} Innovators {{!}} Samuel Colt |url=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/colt_hi.html |website=www.pbs.org |access-date=18 August 2022}}</ref>