This iconic cake of cleaning soap, invented virtually 150 years in the past, has turn into part of Americana largely by promoting its two unusual deserves: “It Floats” and it is “99+44⁄100% Pure.”
The unique product is a no-frills, plain white, mild-scented bar cleaning soap with the title “IVORY” etched into it in script. Impressively, it has stayed precisely that manner for 143 years — barring the addition of an Aloe scented selection, and can be nonetheless round.
Ivory cleaning soap’s longevity flies within the face of a notoriously fickle marketplace for private magnificence merchandise the place new traits can seem and disappear in a flash.
So why has Ivory Cleaning soap stood the check of time? One concept is due to its intelligent promoting and branding. Ivory Cleaning soap packaging famously, and relentlessly, touts the attributes of purity and buoyancy.
“That is good execution,” mentioned David Placek, founding father of Lexicon Branding, a branding professional who has helped title such fashionable shopper merchandise as “Swiffer,” “Blackberry” and “Dasani.”
“Simply give it some thought. What number of different soaps are you able to consider that tout an attribute that is analogous to “It Floats?” mentioned Placek. “I am unable to consider one other. It makes you bear in mind it as a result of it additionally makes you concentrate on different soaps that do not float.”
As a result of Ivory Cleaning soap’s taglines have remained constant and endured for over a century and thru generations of customers, they’ve seeped into the unconscious, mentioned Placek.
“Even should you’ve not used Ivory Cleaning soap you recognize about it and also you bear in mind it,” he mentioned.
The want for floating cleaning soap
Ivory Cleaning soap is the brainchild of Procter & Gamble. Not the massive multinational shopper manufacturers conglomerate that it’s in the present day, however of two people — Harley Procter (son of P&G cofounder William Procter) and James N. Gamble (son of P&G’s different cofounder, James Gamble).
It was within the late nineteenth century, a interval when river bathing was prevalent amongst giant swaths of the inhabitants. Now think about shedding your grip on a bar of cleaning soap while you’re immersed waist-deep in murky water.
However what if there was a cleaning soap bar that would float?
Gamble, in keeping with P&G’s web site, acknowledged the “floating cleaning soap” might revolutionize the washing expertise in additional methods than one.
He initially thought the floating cleaning soap might be used each for laundry and for laundry up. Over time, the cleaning soap bar primarily turned a shower cleaning soap.
Naming the cleaning soap was one other story.
In keeping with P&G legend, Harley Procter came across the phrase “ivory” whereas attending church and thought it completely match the brand new cleaning soap’s appear and feel and each males adopted “Ivory Cleaning soap” because the title.
P&G launched the cleaning soap in 1879 hyping it not solely as a cleaning soap bar that floated however for its purity.
That declare, in keeping with the corporate, hinged on a examine of the cleaning soap by chemistry professors on the request of the inventors. One examine confirmed the cleaning soap had solely a small quantity of impurities — 56/100 of a % — of a non cleaning soap materials in it.
So that they determined to play that up in Ivory Cleaning soap’s promoting, rounding it as much as create its second iconic tagline — “99 and 44-100% pure.”
P&G maintains that whereas it continues to innovate its Ivory Cleaning soap, the product continues to be made with a easy system freed from dyes and parabens meant to softly cleanse the pores and skin.
It has, nevertheless, prolonged the model to different merchandise.
Ivory cleaning soap has turn into so iconic that in 2001 P&G donated a group of its Ivory Cleaning soap artifacts to the Smithsonian Establishment, together with its earliest promoting and a bar of unused cleaning soap from the Forties.
Lexicon Branding’s Placek mentioned Ivory Cleaning soap is a product manner forward of its time. “It was ‘pure’ earlier than pure, clear and easy merchandise turned as fashionable as they’re with customers in the present day,” he mentioned.
