Here is a little blog that might be a bit incoherent, but if you read the title “Notes About Procter & Gamble and Soap” and are still reading, then perhaps that will be fine.
Procter & Gamble, a consumer goods corporation now worth over $80 billion, was founded in 1837 in Cincinnati, Ohio. One of its founders, William Procter, was a candlemaker born in England. The other founder, James Gamble, was an Irish-born soap maker. The company they founded together initially started to produce…candles and soap. Amazing!
The Civil War was a boon for the nascent company, because the Union government gave the corporation contracts to produce soap and candles for the army. The 1,000 cases of soap needed each day by the Union army boosted P&G’s profits. The army could have used more soap than that considering the high percentage of soldiers who died from infections because of unsterile conditions during medical treatment. In the post-war era, countless soldiers had become familiarized with P&G products, and were thus more likely to buy them after the war ended.
In 1879, P&G created a product so famous that there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to it alone, Ivory soap. Tiny soap bubbles within this soap cause it to float in water, and its name was inspired by a verse in the Bible that exemplified clean luxury: “all thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.” As a side note, myrrh has strong antiseptic properties, one of the reasons why it was extraordinarily valuable in the olden days.
By the early 1900s, P&G had diversified and was now selling food products as well. As a result of success, it now had a significant budget for advertising, and had plenty of money to throw away on creative advertising methods. In previous decades, the company had used poem submissions from customers, giveaways of paintings by famous artists, and celebrity endorsements in order to market its products.
In the 1930s, P&G began a new campaign: sponsoring serial dramas on the radio. Frequent P&G products that sponsored these programmes were Oxydol, Duz, and Ivory soaps, thus giving rise to the name “soap operas” for daytime serial dramas. (From this one fact sprang a blog. I can ramble about ANYTHING.)
P&G’s soap operas were no ephemeral phenomenon. Many of them ran for decades. When television began to replace the radio as the primary form of entertainment, the company began to move production to television serials. In fact, some radio serials were simply adapted for this new medium and continued with the same storyline.
The most impressive (if that is the right word) soap opera produced by P&G was “Guiding Light,” which ran from 1952-2009 and holds the world record for the longest-running TV drama, with an astounding 18,262 episodes. P&G also ended their last remaining soap opera (“As the World Turns”) in 2009, marking an end to 76 years in the production of these dramas. The genre, of course, persists with other sponsors.
This blog is feeling like a very long P&G ad, so just to make it clear that it isn’t, here’s a little more information about the company:
As with many large consumer goods corporations, P&G uses large quantities of palm oil in their products. Palm oil production is a major cause of deforestation, particularly in Malaysia. In addition, there are absurd labor violations that occur on palm oil plantations, and companies such as P&G aren’t exactly tripping over themselves to end these practices. There. Have I convinced you that this blog is not sponsored by P&G?
Green Humanist 