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"Blessed by the Pope." P. & G. learned long ago not to take any assumption for granted. Once an advertising layout was proposed, using the traditional prescription symbol Rx; researchers found that 40% of the women they interviewed had no idea what it meant. Another time P. & G. planned to use the word "concentrated" in an ad, discovered that many housewives thought it meant "blessed by the Pope." President McElroy and everyone else at P. & G. constantly bear in mind the fact that woman is fickle—and her memory short. She must be constantly reminded of the product she loves. For example, during World War II's materials shortage, P. & G. dropped Chipso, once the nation's No. i packaged soap. At war's end, Chipso was put on sale again. But P. & G. was amazed to find that housewives had forgotten an old favorite, so Chipso was dropped for good.
In the low-price field, a housewife's loyalty is ephemeral. Just when she is reaching for a cake of Ivory, her eye may be caught by a competing brand with a premium of a tube of toothpaste thrown in, or new promises of health and happiness. The selling lures must be constantly changed. For years, contests were P. & G.'s most successful promotions: it has given away well over $1,000,000 in cash and prizes, including some 300 autos, and a handful of life annuities of $1,000 to $1,200 a year. Right now, P. & G.'s Camay is running a $50,000 contest to get new customers ("I like new Camay with Cold Cream because . . ."). But McElroy's admen think the days of contests are numbered, since prizes nowadays have to be tremendous to raise much interest.*
All this superselling started in 1837, when British-born William Procter, a candlemaker, and Irish-born James Gamble, a soapmaker, married sisters and went into business together. At the beginning, they peddled their crude soap and candles in a wheelbarrow in Cincinnati, then a frontier town. But as the region grew up, the company prospered. Soon its wares were being shipped by boat to New Orleans, Louisville and Pittsburgh, and gross sales rose to $1,000,000 a year.
P. & G. got its first mass-production orders in the Civil War, when it supplied all the soap for the Union armies of the West. Then, one day in 1875, a forgetful workman made a mistake that was to mold the company's future: he left his soap-mixing machine running during lunch hour, thus turned out a batch of soap full of tiny air bubbles. It seemed a dreadful mistake, but somehow the batch got out of the factory.
Soon P. & G. was swamped with orders for "more of this floating soap." (In the years since then, P. & G. admits to only two documented instances of cakes that sank—probably because the air bubbles had been squeezed out during storage.) In church one day, Harley Procter, a son of the founder, found a name for the new product in Psalms: "All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad."