During World War I, Kimberly-Clark made a material called Cellucotton, a creped wadding made from wood pulp that was far more absorbent than cotton and cheaper to produce. With cotton in short supply, the military bought it for surgical dressings, and the company experimented with a thinner version for gas mask filters. Then the war ended in 1918, and Kimberly-Clark was left holding a large surplus of a material built for a customer that no longer needed it.

The company went looking for new uses. One was Kotex, launched in 1920. Another came in 1924, after the company figured out how to press the material into a thin, soft sheet. It named the product Kleenex and sold it as a disposable way to remove cold cream and makeup, a replacement for the stained “cold cream towel” that hung in many bathrooms. A box of 100 sheets cost 65 cents. The ads featured movie stars and talked about keeping a pretty skin.

Then the letters started arriving. Customers wrote in to say they were using Kleenex for something else entirely: blowing their noses. Inside the company, this set off a real disagreement. The head of research wanted to sell Kleenex as a disposable handkerchief for colds and hay fever. The head of advertising thought that was a mistake and wanted to stay with the beauty market that had launched the product.

Instead of letting the more senior opinion win, the company ran a test. It placed ads in a newspaper in Peoria, Illinois, and asked readers which use they preferred. About 60 percent chose the handkerchief. In 1930 Kimberly-Clark switched its pitch to “the handkerchief you can throw away,” which opened the product up to men, women and children instead of only women at the vanity. Sales doubled in the first year of the new campaign.

The product didn’t change. The company had a disagreement it could have argued about for years, and it settled it with one inexpensive question put to actual customers.