Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [103]
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Pear’s remained the leading soap brand in the UK. However, towards the end of the century the market was starting to radically evolve.
In an October 2001 article in the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting charted our love affair with soap:
Over the past 100 years, soap has reflected the development of consumer culture. Some of the earliest brand names were given to soap; it was one of the first mass-produced goods to be packaged and the subject of some of the earliest ad campaigns. Its manufacturers pioneered market research; the first TV ads were for soap; soap operas, tales of domestic melodrama, were so named because they were often sponsored by soap companies. Soap made men rich – William Hesketh Lever, the 33-year-old who built Port Sunlight [where Pear’s was produced], for one – and it is no coincidence that two of the world’s oldest and biggest multinationals, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, rose to power on the back of soap.
Recently though, Bunting argued, a change has emerged. The mass-produced block has been abandoned for its liquid versions – shower gels, body washes and liquid soap dispensers. ‘In pursuit of our ideal of cleanliness, the soap bar has been deemed unhygienic,’ she claimed.
Of course, this was troubling news for the Pear’s Soap brand and, by the end of the last century, its market share of the soap market had dropped to a low of 3 per cent. Marketing fell to almost zero. Then came the fatal blow. On 22 February 2000 parent company Unilever announced it was to discontinue the Pear’s brand. The cost-saving decision was part of a broader strategy by Unilever to concentrate on 400 ‘power’ brands and to terminate the other 1,200. Other brands for the chop included Radion washing powder and Harmony hairspray.
In fact the brand was transferred to Hindustan Unilever Ltd in 2007, a company 52 per cent owned by Unilever itself. In the UK Pear’s is handled by CERTBrands, a Yorkshire-based company handling a number of India-based brands. A 2010 Facebook campaign forced the soapmakers to abandon a new recipe, introduced the year before.
So why had Pear’s lost its power? Well, the shift towards liquid soaps and shower gels was certainly a factor. But Unilever held onto Dove, another soap bar brand, which still fares exceptionally well. Ultimately, Pear’s was a brand built on advertising and when that advertising support was taken away, the brand identity gradually became irrelevant. After years of staying ahead, Pear’s Soap had failed to ‘hit the present taste’ as Thomas J Barratt might have put it.
Lessons from Pear’s
Every brand has its time. Pear’s Soap was a historical success, but the product became incompatible with contemporary trends and tastes.
Advertising can help build a brand. But brands built on advertising generally need advertising to sustain them.
92 Ovaltine
When a brand falls asleep
In 2002, the Ovaltine brand celebrated its 98th birthday. That same year, it closed its UK factory and was forced to admit it had finally lost its main market. The Ovaltine brand was put up for sale and, at the time of writing the first edition, no interested buyers had emerged. Now, however, the brand has been subsumed into the portfolio of Twinings, the tea company, and all but vanished in its Food Services Division.
First produced by a Swiss food company in 1904, the malt drink with added vitamins became the UK’s favourite bedtime drink. However, although commonly sipped to get a good night’s sleep, the original advertising for the brand highlighted opposite qualities. Indeed, Ovaltine was an official sponsor of the 1948 Olympics and was billed as an ‘energy drink’ years before the term became widely adopted. In 1953, it was used by Sir Edmund Hillary on his famous Everest expedition and it was even reported to cure impotence, decades before the arrival