Procter & Gamble

[Contessa Donatella]

Soap Opera: The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble by Alecia Swasy. Times Books. Random House. © 1993.

          Foreword: As the maker of Ivory soap, Tide detergent, and Crest toothpaste, Procter & Gamble is a household name. It is America's thirteenth largest company, lauded by business schools as a model for succeess. But behind P&G's wholesome image is a control-obsessed company so paranoid that Wall Street analysts, employees, and the chairman himself refer to it as "the Kremlin." The company demands conformity and unquestioning loyalty from its employees, who work in a strict and oppresssive environment. P&G's wealth and power ensures it gets what it wants, from tax breaks to the eager services of Washington lobbyists.three years---tells the full chilling story of life w ithin the P&G behemoth. (Alecia Swasy is a staff reporter for "The Wall Street Journal." She was responsible for the paper's coverage of Procter & Gamble for three years prior to writing this book. She lives in Atlanta.)  Drawn from interviews with with over 300 former and current P&G employees (including CEO Ed Artzt, visits to P&G operations in five countries, and thousands of court and company documents, "Soap Opera" reveals the dirty tricks and draconian mind-set of the sompany with the "99 44/100% pure" facade. Included here is the real story behind P&G's Rely brand tampons and their link to women's deaths from toxic shock syndrome---and how P&G tried to suppress that evidence. Swasy takes us to Taylor County, Florida, where residents drink bottled water because P&G's influence allowed the company to flood the local river with dioxin-laden toxic waste from its paper mill. Among these and dozens of other examples of the company's cutthroat nature is Swasy's own story of P&G's unethical seizure of Cincinnati phone recoards in an effort to track down her sources. Wonderfully readable and impeccably researched, "Soap Opera" is a sobering look at the price of success in America.

          From the Prologue to "Soap Opera" by Alecia Swasy:
          Around the globe Procter & Gamble Co. products take consumers from cradle to grave. Pampers diapers cover babies' bottoms and Ivory soap floats in their bathtubs. Crest toothpaste brushes their teeth and Tide detergent washes their clothes. Folgers coffee starts the workday; Duncan Hines cakes mark each birthday.
          The Cincinnati company is an American success story. A share of P&G stock purchased in 1986 hsd appreciated 159 percent by 1992---more than double the Dow Jones Average growth rate---and the company has increased dividends to shareholders for thrity-six years in a row. All told, P&G goods are found in 98 percent of all kitchens and pantries.
     It management practices have shaped generations of U.S. business leaders. Harvard Business School teaches P&G's heralded brand-management sytstem to each year's crop of MBA students. P&G's invention of selling competing brands has been duplicated to sell everything from Cadillacs to candy bars. P&G alumni are sprinkled throughout the world's leading companies.
     But this Wall Street darling isn't all it appears to be. P&G has manipulated and controlled consumers, competitors, and the marketplace, while hiding behind the "99 44/100% pure" image cultivate by years of marketing savvy.

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     P&G, which popularized consumer advertising and daytime soap operas, has built an empire partially by reinforcing stereotypes about women as subservient to men. Its ads all share a theme of condescension toward women and the promotion of consumers' self-consciousness about cleanliness and status. Marcia Grace, who helped create P&G advcertising at Wells Rich Greene, said: "P&G is at least twenty years behind the American woman. The problem is throughout the company. Even though it diversified into foods and cosmetics, it started as a soap company and got this fix that a woman's chief delight is a clean dish, clean floor, and clean shirt. The company doesn't seem to be able to step away from that."
     One reason P&G's sexist mind-set continually surfaces in its ads is the lack of women inside to challenge P&G's senior management. And the company rarely listens to its agencies. P&G's standing as the country's largest advertiser gives it a stranglehold on Madison Avenue. Armed with a $2.15-billion annual advertising budget, the company blankets the country with messages about Ivory purity, Downy softness, and Scope freshness. Those massive P&G accounts offer steady work in a tumultous industry, but the soap company controls virtually every aspect of its ad agencies' work. It has tried to block mergers between agencies and moved multimillion-dollar accounts when its wishes weren't obeyed. Even account managers get locked into restrictive P&G agreements that limit where they can work after doing business with the company. Like their counterparts inside P&G, they go along with Procter's ways or they're out. "We're pretty well trapped." lamented the head of one of P&G's major ad agencies.

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     In 1933 "Ma Perkins," sponsored by Oxydol, a P&G soap, aired on Cincinnati's WLW in August, then went national on the NBC network four months later. These were among the first soap operas, also known as "washboard weepers" because of their tearjerker plots.
     The fifteen-minute show ran five days a week and mentioned Oxydol's name twenty to twenty-five times during each episode. "We knew it would be very irritating to some people and we'd get complaints," recalled Walter Lingle, a P&G marketing executive who helped launch the show. "But the business was bad enough that we decided to try it." P&G received 5,000 letters complaining about "Ma Perkins" within the first week. But, after a month, salesmen were calling to say Oxydol sales were up. By the end of the year, sales had doubled.
     Ma Perkins, played by twenty-three-year-old Virginia Payne, became America's beloved "mother of the air." Fans wrote asking her advice on their personal lives. Some sent her pot holders. One older woman suggested in a letter that the two c ould be companions in their "fading ddays." She asked Ma for directions to her home in "Rushville Center," so she could begin packing her bags.
     "Ma Perkins" attracted  more listeners than many nighttime shows. To count how many people actually listened, P&G conducted one of its first market research tests on the impact of soap operas. During the show, listeners were offered a package of flower seeds for 10 cents and an Oxydol boxtop. More than a million boxtops flooded P&G headquarters. The show helped sell 3 billion boxes of Oxydol before it was finally cancelled in 1960, with Mrs. Payne, by then fifty, still in the title role.
     P&G tried its soap opera format on daytime television. Their first daytime soap was "The First Hundred Years", launched in 1950. It lasted only a month.
     But, P&G tried again with "Search for Tomorrow" and a TV version of its radio show, "The Guiding Light". By the mid-fifties it had thirteen different soaps on the air.
     The concept of continuing characters influenced P&G advertising as well. Elm City, USA was the setting for an ad campaign to introduce Comet cleanser. The story lineshowed homemakers fighting stubborn stains with ease, thanks to Comet. That particular campaign led to Josephine the plumber, a character played for eleven years by Jane Withers, who got her start as a sidekick to Shirley Temple. "Characters like Josephine became part of the American folklore." Saatchi & Saatchi's Milt Gossett said. Other characters included Charley, Dash's washer repairman; Rosie, the waitress who obsessively mops up & spills with Bounty; the annoying Mr. Whipple, who begged shoppers not to squeeze the Charmin; and Mrs. Olsen, a Swedish caterer who insisted that Folgers mountain-grown coffee is the richest tasting. By uaing familiar characters to make the pitch , P&G struck a resounding chord with consumers. "P&G ads were ubiquitous," said Miner Raymond, who produced about 25,000 P&G ads during his tenure at the company. "The whole family gathered to watch television, and they listened to the commercials."
     The company was criticized from the start about the sappy content of its ads and TV shows, but P&G believed it was in the business to sell soap, nothing else. "The problem of improving the literary tastes of the people is the problem of the schools," said CEO Neil McElroy in 1953. P&G consumers "aren't intellectuals---they're ordinary people, good people, who win wars for us, produce our manufactured products, and grow our food." He then added, "They use a lot of soap."
     P&G products and advertising linked happiness to use of its brands. For instance, many ads are filmed in upscale homes that are beyond most consumers' reach. The original Folgers "Best Part of Wakin' Up" commercial was filmed at a $20-million horse ranch near Ronald Reagan's residence in California. "P&G sets itself up as the gold standard," one advertising manager said.
     The strong emotional sells of ads focus on guilt about dandruff and smelly armpits. "Morning breath was a P&G invention," said former brand manager Jack Gordon. To help it sell more Scope mouthwash, the company once hired a Jungian psychologist to conduct focus groups to  uncover people's deep-seated fears of having bad breath.
     On the day of the shareholders' meeting, dozens of members of the National Organization for Women picketed P&G's headquarters. Forty women pushed babies in strollers and carried signs demanding fair treatmnt in ads. "WHO PUT THE P&G IN MALE CHAUVINIST PIG?" read several.
     P&G's G-rated nature is hypocritical considering its continued sponsorship of the daytime soap operas "Guiding Light", "Another World," and "As the World Turns", which all portray marriage as disposable as diapers. For example, in a typical episode of "Another World" the women sob about their tortured love lives.        
     P&G  has moved into new markets in China & Russia & they've sent their old traditional soap operas there, too. "Search for Tomorrow and "Guiding Light".

Rising Tide: P&G: by Davis Dyer, Frederick Dalzell and Rowena Olegario. Lessons from 156 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble. © 2004. The Procter & Gamble Company. Harvard Business School Press.

(Davis Dyer is a founding director of The Winthrop Group, Inc., and a senior consultant at the Monitor Group. Frederick Dalzell is a history partner at the Winthrop Group. Rowena Olegario is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.)

     The Winning Strategies That Built a Brand Powerhouse:
Procter & Gamble is one of the world's largest and most influential companies---the maker of numerous billion-dollar brands that have helped shape the way millions of people live today. Brands like Tide, Crest, Ivory, and Pampers have become household names in modern consumer culture---and legends in the annals of brand-building history. Yet the full story behind P&G's remarkable growth and success has never been told.
     "Rising Tide" tells the fascinating tale of P&G's 165-year journey: how it grew from a two-man soap and cancle maker in 1837 into a $40 billion global brand powerhouse, employing over 100,000 people in 80 countries. As it charts that journey, the book reveals the principles and practices of brand-building P&G-style: how the company learned---through trial, error, and breakthrough successes---to consistently anticipate  and satisfy consumer needs.
     Based on unprecedented access to P&G's corporate archives and exclusive interviews with key executives and employees, David Dyer, Frederick Dalzell, and Rowena Olegario vividly recount the key events and episodes that stimulated P&G's learned abut brand building. From the birth and evolution of brand giants like Ivory, Tide, Crest to lessons learned from product disasters like Olestra, and from intense global competition to the diaper wars, "Rising Tide" reveals insightful lessons about product innovation, global expansion, leadership transformation, business reinvention, and brand building. From a powerful belief in doing the right thing to an unparalleled passion for winning to a laserlike focus on consumer needs, the authors distill the powerful arsenal of branding principles P&G has built over the years.
     A compelling and candid account of hard-won, sustained success, "Rising Tide" is also a strategic guide---taken straight from the playback of the brand master---to delivering superior consumer value.

Back Flap:

     "'Rising Tide"' tells the story of how Procter & Gamble has consistently ground new growth out of its core businesses and has developed a repeatable formula to push the boundaries of its businesses out into new adjacencies. All companies can benefit from the approaches that P&G has used to understand its customers in detail and to turn that unique level of insight into lasting competitive advantage."--Chris Zook, Director, Bain & Company

     "Every businessperson can and should learn from the company that taught the world how to brand---Procter & Gamble. Dyer, Dalzell, and Olegario take a comprehensive and engaging walk through 165 years of P&G hisotry. Even the most experienced readers will come away with a few new lessons for their own businesses." --Roger Martin, Dean of the Roman School of Management, University of Toronto

     "'Rising Tide' is two books in one: a fascinating historical account and a relevant resource for tackling the challenges businesses face today and in the future. 'Rising Tide' illustrates how P&G's relentless focus on the two key principles of success---developing people and meeting ever-changing customer needs---has not only endured through the decades but still instructs us today."--John Costello, Executive Vice President, Merchandising and Marketing , The Home Depot

     "Dyer, Dalzell, and Olegario go behind the scenes and headlines to tell the story of how Procter & Gamble created legendary products and identities. With flair and skill they unpack the rich history of the company's brands, strategies, and leaders. The results of this fscinating story are a series of lessons that no manager interesed in brand stewardship can afford to be without" --Nancy F. Koehn, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business Dchool

From the Index:

page 62 & following:
P&G Faces a New Medium
     Another sign of internal soundness was the company's ability to manage the shift to ardio advertising. Procter & Gamble was the largest magazine adverstiser in the industry on the eve of radio broadcasting, outspending Colgate $3.3 million to $2.3 million. It was deeply staked, in other words, in the leading media of its day. But the advertising environment was about to undergo a seismic shift. A new media emerged in the late 1920s, one that would demand new types of advertsing.
     Radio took some time to define itself as a medium: The basic broadcast format (commercial broadcasting on national networks, sponsored by corporate advertising) took form slowly, in bits and pieces over the 1920s and early 1930s, as radio stations, studios, and commercial sponsors experimented with different ways of putting together programming. Procter & Gamble played a leading role in this process of definition, launching a series of creative (and expensive) initiatives. In 1933, with the national debut of "Ma Perkins", the company found the formula. "Soap operas" became a fixture of radio and the centerpiece of P&G's marketing campaigns. By the time the Depression began to ease in the late 1930s, P&G had established itself as one of the biggest advertisers on the airwaves. Just as the company had four decades before in magazines (and would again several decades later in television), P&G had moved into the new medium while it was still experimental and found creative, resonant wasy to embed its brands there.

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     Procter & Gamble's soap brands countered as best they could. "Those new detergents may be all right for dishes, but your hands aren't made of china," warned ads for Ivory *in* the soap opera "The Road of Life". "Duz does a wash like no detergent can---it's the soap in Duz that dos it!" proclaimed ads during "The Guiding Light". To little effect.

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     Leading the Way in Television Advertising
     As it expanded into new products and businesses, P&G moved quickly to exploit the new marketing potential of television. With some 20 percent of airtime devoted to commercials, televsion became an important medium for communicating with consumers. In a 1979 interview, chief executive Ed Harness explained why the company placed such apremium on radio and TV advertising: "There's a high frequency of purchase with (P&G's) products. That's why we use frequency of advertising, why we use daytime serials, where we talk to the audience every day. If we don't have (the consumer's) attention, someone else will get it."
     When television began to appear in U.S. homes during the late 1940s, P&G immediately realized that the new medium was very different from radio. TV was much more expensive because it involved more elaborate casting and set design. In the early days, each show had to be done locally because there was no coast-to-coast transmission. Company executives debated how much to invest in the new medium, while salespeople in rural areas resisted domestic shifts in advertising spending because few homes in their sales territories had TVs. But along with other large advertisers, P&G soon grasped the potential of TV commercials. In the seven years from 1949 to 1956, total dollars spent on TV ads in the United States rose from about one-tenth of the amount spent on radio ads to nearly two and one-half times as much. The cost of network airtime to advertisers nearly tripled, but the size of the audience increased so fast that the cost per household fell by more than half. By the early 1970s, P&G was spending some $2000 million a year on television advertising. All by itself, the company accounted for a full *one-tenth* of the networks' total revenues. But even so, P&G estimated that it spent only one-quarter of one cent for each commercial that reached a U.S. household---far less than the cost of a postage stamp.
     On July 23, 1948 P&G aired its first regular TV broadcast, "Fashions on Parade," jointly sponsored by Prell and Ivory Snow. Howard Morgens, who was then vice president of advertising, was a strong advocate of TV programming. In 1949 he formed P&G Productions to produce shows for company sponsorship. "Fireside Theatre," the first P&G production, went on the air that same year. Within a few years, the company became one of the world's largest producers of live and filmed entertainment. Having learned the power of radio as a mass medium, P&G moved quickly to occupy the most desirable programming time in U.S. television. (The company would later do the same in Europe and South America.) Of course, the popularity of the new TV shows could not have happened without the rapid spread of TV and TV stations. The 1950s can properly be called the decade of television. Coast-to-coast transmission became available in 1951, and by the late 1960s, TV had become nearly universal, with 95 percent of U.S. homes having at least one set.
     At first, all of the P&G shows were nighttime productions, but brand managers began urging the making of daytime shows. Debates arose about the effectiveness of such a move. Would women drop what they were doing and watch? What about men, most of whome would be out working? Such worries proved groundless. The company's first attempt at daytime television was a serial called "The First Hundred Years". While that show lasted only two years, P&G's second effort became a hit. The radio program "The Guiding Light"  moved to TV in 1952 and became the longest-running show in the history of electronic media. In 1956, P&G became the first company to produce half-hour serials, with the debut of "Another World" and "The Edge of Night." At one point during the mid-1950s, P&G had thirteen different serials on TV, making it the world's biggest buyer of television time. Until the advent of cable television in the 1980s, the company was able to reach up to 90 percent of all U.S. households by sponsoring popular programs and placing ads in national magazines

[Contessa Donatella]

As P&G’s Soap Opera Era Ends, Our Innovation in Entertainment Continues
Monday, September 13, 2010 10:20 pm EDT

 

This week marks the end of an era for P&G Productions, as we say goodbye to our last company-owned soap opera, As The World Turns. After 54 years, the show will end its remarkable run on television on Friday 17 September 2010, when the final episode airs on CBS.

 

For the past five decades, As The World Turns has been entertaining audiences in the U.S. and around the world and providing P&G a platform for our brand messages. While we look back with great affection at this iconic program, we also look forward to continuing our history of innovation by presenting new entertainment that brings families together.

P&G has always been at the forefront of production innovation, with a rich history of produced programs, beginning with the development of radio serials in the 1930s. It was our sponsorship of these programs with brands like Duz and Oxydol that coined the phrase "soap opera."

 

In the decades that followed, P&G Productions created 20 soap operas on radio and television, becoming a pioneer in producing award-winning daytime serials like As The World Turns and Guiding Light, which ended in September 2009 after 72 years. GL still holds the Guinness World Record for the longest running show in broadcast history.

P&G's experience in production goes beyond daytime television, having developed 50 made-for-TV movies and mini-series, more than 35 years of The People's Choice Awards, as well as beauty pageants, variety shows and more.

 

P&G's production focus now centers on creating and sponsoring programs that bring families together. This is exemplified through our innovative partnership with Walmart in the U.S. to bring back Family Movie Night. The first two products of our partnership "Secrets of the Mountain" and "The Jensen Project" were huge successes, both with our target audience and for our business. The next family movie night is in the works for late fall with a film titled "A Walk in My Shoes."

 

We've even been recognized for our work by the U.S. television industry through a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences at the Daytime Emmys. And in October, P&G will break new ground again, becoming the first corporation ever inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame.

 

So, this week as we air the final episode of As The World Turns, we are closing an important chapter in P&G's production history. As The World Turns will be remembered as groundbreaking and risk-taking – a drama with heart. Its beloved characters more like family members to those who tuned in day after day, year after year. We are proud of the show and its place in P&G's history, and we're extremely grateful to the generations of loyal fans who invited us into their homes every day.