Floating Battle

The soap battle of the century last week came out into the open for all to see.

For years huge Lever Bros. (Swan Spry, Rinso, Lux, Lifebuoy, etc.) and huger Procter & Gamble (Ivory, Crisco, Oxydol, etc.) have slugged at each other in the nice-Nellie manner of the advertising campaign--with occasional forays that were not so nice, but not so noticeable to the layman, either. Now the battle has exploded in a big way: in Boston a Federal grand jury indicted Procter & Gamble for using the mails to defraud. By the terms of a 57-page, 40-count indictment this turns out to mean bribing various Lever Bros, employes with aliases like "Babe," "Red" and "Chick" to betray production, sales and advertising secrets "against the peace and dignity of the U.S."

Procter & Gamble, full of years (it was founded in 1837) and good works, denied the whole kit & caboodle of charges countered with some of their own.

The Battle Began with a damage suit over granulated soap. Lever's Rinso had proudly dominated that field since 1918, and Lever is still plenty mad over the $5,000,000 it had to dish out to Procter & Gamble and Colgate because a new spraying process Lever adopted in the late '20s turned out (in 1937) to be a patent infringement. About the same time, Lever enraged Procter & Gamble by bringing out Spry to compete with Procter & Gamble's long-established Crisco. Smart Lever Bros.--British-founded, now ambiguously owned by British Unilever's Dutch affiliate Lever Bros. & Unilever N.V., through a South African holding company--has always been famed for spotting and invading a good established consumer-goods field where there was room for competition. But the battle of shortening was really only a minor engagement.

The Big Fight was still over soap, and among the juiciest corners of the U.S. soap market was the all-purpose, bland, white soap that floated.* For years there have been other floating soaps in a small way, but "99-44 100% pure" Ivory has always been synonymous with floating soap to the average U.S. citizen. As far back as 1933, Lever experiments with a "different" floating soap had led them to the U.S. Patent Office. In 1940 the company obtained a patent on a "revolutionary" (and still extremely hush-hush) soapmaking process: a "continuous" manufacturing technique that turned out floating soap in a stream of cakes, rather than in batches (brewed separately in caldrons).

Suits & Counter Suits. While Lever Bros, was still experimenting with its floating wonder (already dubbed "Swan" and being tested in key sales areas), Procter & Gamble, in 1940, came out with a "new Ivory" also made by a continuous process. In February 1941, Lever cracked down on the "new Ivory" in the Baltimore courts with a patent-infringement suit. Less than two months later P. & G. hit back with a Cincinnati plea for an injunction against the sales of Swan as an obvious and unfair imitation of Ivory.

To the layman, Swan and the "new Ivory" indeed look, smell and act alike Ivory's traditional black-on-white wrapper was suddenly jazzed up to white-on-blue after Swan's white-on-green wrapper began attracting attention on the nation's counters, and Ivory's water content is now identical with Swan's 22.5%, instead of its earlier content of some 30%. But which came first is still a chicken-&-egg proposition before the Baltimore and Cincinnati courts. Meanwhile, it has become quite obvious to the sophisticated advertising reader that Ivory ("nothing has been added to produce artificial whiteness--no clay or similar insoluble material . . . ") and Swan ("the first really new floating soap since the gay nineties....8 ways better than any other . . .") are engaging in as knock-down-&-drag-out a fight as U.S. advertising pages have seen for years.

Where It Will All End no man could say last weekQ+east of all Lever Bros, or P. & G. Each swore to a finish fight--and each had more than the means to carry through. While P. & G. denied any "industrial espionage" on their part, they hinted that Lever Bros, had engaged in such practices. P. & G. also had hurt feelings because they had left the B.O. (Lifebuoy) field to Lever and thought it no more than fair for Lever to let P. & G. alone in the floating soap business. But to the casual observer one happy fact was crystal-clear last week: old-fashioned competition has not perished from the earth. And in the course of their soap battle P. & G. and Lever Bros, between them have sold more floating soap than has ever been sold before.

*The secret of floating soap is roughly similar to the secret of whipped cream: in both cases air is forced into the ingredients to make them lighter than water despite their original specific gravity.

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