The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [86]
Harley Procter was unusual in his grasp of publicity and image, but soap makers and advertisers soon under-stood that they were natural allies. Since there was a high profit margin in soap but not a great deal to distinguish one brand from another, there was all the more reason to proclaim the superiority of individual brands. The newish business of advertising tried out new schemes and techniques on the newish commodity, toilet soap. By the end of the nineteenth century, soap and patent medicines had become advertising’s biggest customers.
Inculcating the handwashing habit—an early Pears’ soap ad.
One of the first companies to buy full-page magazine ads was the British firm Pears’ Soap. Some of its early ideas, such as a little black child who bathes with Pears’ and emerges lily-white from the neck down, are worse than dated. But celebrity testimonials, which Pears’ began using in the 1880s, proved one of the most successful ways to sell soap. Underneath a picture of a bathing beauty holding a sheet to her bosom while she selects a cake of Pears’ was a commendation (“matchless for the hands and complexion”) from Adelina Patti, the opera singer. The possibility that the pretty bather was Patti remained open. Lillie Langtry, the actress and the Prince of Wales’ mistress, also recommended Pears’. Less titillating and designed for the religiously inclined American public was a testimonial from Henry Ward Beecher, a nationally known minister (and the brother of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe), who endorsed Pears’ and washing in general for their next-to-godliness qualities.
B. T. Babbitt, of Babbitt’s Best Soap, had another idea—the premium. Customers who sent in twenty-five soap wrappers received illustrations, some of which were printed in the hundreds of thousands. Wool Soap, on the other hand, appealed to its customers’ altruism by donating a penny to the Chicago temple of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for each wrapper returned by a customer. Members of Woodbury’s “Facial Purity League” received club buttons, although it’s hard to visualize many late—nineteenth-century women wearing them. Sapolio Soap invented a jolly town, “Spotless Town,” and its chief personages, who were characterized by simple, memorable jingles. All these gambits—testimonials, premiums, prizes, catchy slogans and jingles, continuing characters—that were later refined and adapted in ad campaigns for a variety of products made their first appearance in advertisements for soap. Although advertisers stressed the germ—fighting powers of soap, especially in ads targeted at mothers, they were more likely to focus on its ability to make its users youthful, beautiful and above all sweet—smelling.
“Ultimately the drugstore became the symbol of the industrialized aura; it is the supermarket of mass-produced glamour and scents for a deodorized population. People who obsessively scrub away their auras can pick and choose a better one there.”
—Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetting
When it came to rendering the world as clean and odourless as possible, the 1920s were a watershed decade. As cities expanded, and people worked close to one another in crowded offices and factories, they grew unhappily aware of the smells produced by their own bodies and those of others. The arrival of women in the work world accelerated this new sensitivity. The fastidiousness that had first surfaced, tentatively, in late-eighteenth—century Europe was becoming an American obsession. At the same time, prosperity was at an all-time high. People could afford the products that would enable them to live in a smell—less zone, a safe place where they would neither “offend” nor be “offended.”
In the same decade, advertising was becoming ever more ingenious at satisfying existing wants and creating new wants. Sometimes, as with Listerine, it gave a new name to an old problem and achieved astounding success with an old product. A favourite case study in the annals of advertising, Listerine—a mixture of thymol, menthol, methyl salicylate