Selling: Detergent War

On television, the soap business is a bubbly world of pretty housewives showing off their blinding white wash, of jocular lady plumbers, and of children smearing their cherubic faces with soft, pure suds. In reality, the soap industry is one of the least jocular, least cherubic sectors of U.S. business. Last week on TV programs from Match Game to Monday Night at the Movies and on supermarket shelves across the U.S., the soapmakers were kicking and jabbing harder than ever in a battle over which will dominate the most lucrative spot in the market—the laundry room. Total soap and detergent sales last year reached $1.3 billion, a 7% gain over 1962, and $750 million of that was churned up in the nation’s home washing machines.

Tide’s In. The major soap manufacturers are often called the Big Three —Procter & Gamble, Lever Bros., Colgate-Palmolive—but a more apt description of the industry would be the Big One. P. & G. accounts for more than half the cleaning products sold in the U.S., and its profits are more than three times those of its competitors combined. P. & G. and Lever were once equals in the laundry room, but P. & G. rose to the top on Tide, the first powerful heavy-duty detergent; introduced in 1946, it is still the bestseller. Lever tried to counter with Rinso Blue, but P. & G. swamped its efforts with bargain prices and intensive advertising.

Today’s big fight is over low-suds detergents for automatic washers. Lever’s All leads the field with 36% of low-suds sales—but All once had 98% of the business, and a free sample box was always to be found in every new automatic washing machine. P. & G. muscled All out of the machines by offering manufacturers free TV plugs if they switched to giving away its low-suds Dash or high-suds Tide instead. When a new “active” All formula successfully slowed the upward pace of Dash, P. & G. moved to a new battleground by bringing out a low-suds detergent in tablet form called Salvo, backed by a $26 million ad campaign. Lever counterattacked with a tablet, Vim, but Dash and Salvo now have half the low-suds business.

All’s Cold. Beleaguered Lever is doggedly fighting back with a new Cold Water All, a low sudser that works in cold water and is being pushed in a series of TV commercials stressing that women could go on washing even if the hot water were turned off in cities across the U.S. Lever claims that it saves the cost of heating 30 gallons of hot water for each machine load, is easier on delicate fabrics, and prevents shrinkage. But the job of propagandizing skeptical housewives into believing that cold water washes as well as hot will be long and costly—and no doubt P. & G. will rush out with its own cold-water products if Lever’s is successful. To add to the complexities of the soap war, all three manufacturers will soon offer “soft” detergents that are designed to decompose in sewage systems and end the problem of the sudsy foam that has polluted the drinking water of many communities.