In 1950, the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared that America's trademarks "were the best ambassadors of good will for our way of life." In this paper I examine how the U.S. government actually put this dictum into practice in the early Cold War, creating a corporate-style logo for the Marshall Plan and deploying the Sears, Roebuck catalog as an overseas agent of American capitalism. I suggest that by 1948, American marketers inside and outside government worried that they were losing the "war of ideas" against the Communists, and that their response was to jettison heavy-handed capitalist propaganda in favor of a soft-sell approach in which U.S. products and brands "sold" the American system. That is, instead of selling <em>ideas</em> the same way they sold <em>products</em>, American marketers used <em>products</em> to sell <em>ideas</em>. Moreover, as these marketers learned how to create "America the brand," they also laid important groundwork for a broader shift toward brand-image advertising in the 1950s.