New Owners Hope Oxydol Brand Isn’t All Washed Up

Old isn’t always a good thing for a brand to be in the hard-charging marketing world, where new and improved rules the retail and grocery aisles.

Not even when the brand is Oxydol, Procter & Gamble’s oldest surviving detergent line and the brand that helped make “soap opera” part of the American lexicon.

Procter & Gamble’s recent decision to abandon the 86-year-old soap brand won’t, however, mean the end of the line for the venerable Oxydol name. In an era dominated by “dot-com” dreamers, two young P&G; executives have secured private financing and created a company, Redox Brands Inc., that will try to keep the Oxydol name alive.

Some analysts expect Richard Owen, 31, and Todd Wichmann, 30, to reposition the old detergent as a lower-cost alternative to more costly market leaders.

“They’ll find out real soon if there’s any oxygen left in Oxydol,” Roswell, Ga.-based marketing consultant Al Reis said. “It doesn’t make sense for big companies to keep small brands like this. All it does is clog up the gears.”

Oxydol wasn’t always a bit player at Cincinnati-based P&G.; The brand--which took its name from the oxygen in bleach--was born in St. Louis in 1914 when William Waltke Soap Co. began selling it. P&G; purchased the company and the brand in 1927.

“During the 1800s and early 1900s, you used the same soap to wash your body, your clothes and the floor,” said Julianna Sivulka, a cultural historian at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “But by the 1920s, things had started to get specialized.”

P&G; marketed Oxydol during the 1930s by signing the soap brand on as sponsor of “Ma Perkins,” a radio show first heard in Cincinnati in 1933. The program, described as a romantic drama, subsequently was heard on the NBC and CBS networks.

Virginia Payne played the show’s namesake heroine, appearing in 7,065 consecutive broadcasts, according to North Little Rock, Ark.-based Radio Memories.

Oxydol’s appearance as a sponsor helped to coin the phrase “soap opera,” according to Sivulka. “It was one of the nation’s first and longest- running soap operas.”

Despite its long heritage, Oxydol has done little for P&G; in recent decades. The company generated $11.5 billion last year from fabric and home-care cleaning products, according to Chicago-based Information Resources Inc. Tide, with $701 million in annual sales, was the most popular laundry detergent brand in 1999, while Oxydol sales generated just $6.6 million.

The brand has lagged behind such lesser-known brands as Ariel and Dreft. Marketing experts said Oxydol most likely was cannibalizing sales from Tide, Gain and Cheer, three P&G; brands that sit atop the laundry detergent sector.

P&G;’s sale of the Oxydol brand is in keeping with what a company spokeswoman on Thursday described as “our ongoing policy of focusing on brands with the greatest potential for global growth. Oxydol is a totally domestic brand.”

P&G;, which sells more than 300 brands of consumer goods worldwide, reported $38 billion in 1999 revenue. It regularly drops or sells slower-moving brands, as it did earlier this year when it eliminated the Coast bar-soap line. Sometimes, though, old brands are resurrected, which is what happened with White Cloud, a toilet tissue brand P&G; abandoned in 1993. Last year, an unrelated company revived the brand and signed a five-year agreement to sell White Cloud tissue at the Wal-Mart chain.

P&G;, the nation’s second-largest advertiser behind General Motors Corp., poured $1.68 billion into its U.S. advertising last year. P&G; said Thursday that it will spend less of that huge sum on television commercials and rely more heavily on direct mail, promotional events and the Internet.

Redox will buy soap from P&G; to market under the Oxydol name rather than build its own production plant.

Will the company’s old-style name be a hindrance as the new owners move forward? “I don’t know,” Reis said. “Oxydol probably is perceived as yesterday’s brand. But the letter X is hot--just look at ‘The X-Files.’ ”

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Soap Box Derby

Procter & Gamble, which has sold its long-standing Oxydol brand, dominates the $2-billion domestic laundry detergent market.

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Leading detergents Dollar sales (in millions) Dollar share Tide* $701.4 34.8% Gain* 234.8 11.7 Cheer* 169.2 8.4 Ultra Tide with bleach* 105.8 5.3 Surf (Lever Bros.) 85.0 4.2 Arm & Hammer 80.8 4.0 Tide Free Powder* 76.5 3.8 Ultra Surf Powder (Lever Bros.) 56.6 2.8 Private-label brands 52.3 2.6 Wisk (Lever Bros.) 50.1 2.5 Oxydol* 6.7 0.3

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Source: Information Resources Inc.*P&G; brand