Forcing Truth In
CONSUMING INTEREST
By LESLIE ADRIAN
The chief ingredient of most of these powders and liquids is the polysyllabic chemical just named,-the alkylate in which comes mainly from Shell, who make an industrial cleaning liquid called Teepol which has been the parent of nearly all the washing-up liquids on the market, beginning with Quix way back in 1948. Soap has gradually disappeared from the active ingredients of most of the washing powders and now there is not a single pure soap powder on the market, although some innocents no doubt go on believ- ing, for example, that Persil and Rinso are soap powders because they once were. Now they are both about half soap, just as Oxydol contains about 45 per cent soap and Fairy Snow about 60 per cent. But there have been periods when the formulations of all these have been varied to try to improve 'image and performance.' With no formula on the packet, however, how can the supermarket shopper tell what the pennies are paying for? Is it soap or is it something else, and what does that something else do to the clothes you wash in it?
I have two packets of Persil in front of me : one is of New! Persil '62, 'Washes whiter than ever.; the other is of New High-active Persil. The first claims that it is designed to make lather in the hardest water and that it is the most modern washing powder in the world. The second calls itself a soap powder and warns customers against using it to wash fabrics with flame- resistant finishes. This warning, which also appears on Lux and Fairy Snow packets, is the only clue to the presence of actual soap, except for the hint that if a 'soap powder' changes its self-description to 'washing powder,' it has usually become 100 per cent detergent (I use the single word in preference to `syndets' or adding `synthetic' to distinguish these from soap. which is, of course, a sy n:hetic detergent, tool.
But even the expert observers can be con- fused. A Financial Title. supplement on soap: and detergents last year seemed unaware of Persil's chemical vicissitudes. referring to it as 'soap-based,' which it is and was then, but evi- dently it could change tomorrow, and who would be the wiser? As Sheila Black said in her article, It may rank as a detergent according to the Oxford Dictionary. But. in the public mind, it is emphatically a "soap powder- not to be con- fused with detergents.' Appendix 4 of the Report describes it as 'about 50 per cent pure soap: ether ingredients include sodium carbonate, sodium silicate. ethanolamide, perborate, cotton and nylon fluorescers. and in hard water. Persil, sodium tripolyphosphate and SCMC.' The latter is sodium carboxy methyl cellulose, in case you were curious. It keeps the 'grey' from going back into the fabric in hard water.
When the Consumers' Association did its tests on washing powders two years ago, it reported that the -soap-based mixtures were superior to the detergents for washing clothes and chose Rinso and Persil as joint best buys. At that time they cost the same in the largest sizes, but Persil had a small 7d. packet. Appendix 4 says 'Rinso is similar [to Persil] in most respects in soft water but has no nylon fluorescer.' So you pays your money, but what choice do you get? In the smaller sizes none. apparently, but in the giant or jumbo sizes the difference is in the premium offer.
Last week, shopping around to see what the big two were doing to capture sales, I bought a giant packet of Persil which offered a 'free' Storage jar in return for a 9d. postal order and
an assortment of packet tops. On reading the small print, I discovered that 'This offer closes on the 27th May, 1966.' Next time I'll take the plastic tulip.
The Consumer Council's third annual report, published a fortnight ago, reminds me of a num- ber of almost lost causes that it and I have been keeping alive and occasionally kicking. When the Council's journal Focus published its first number in February, it called the Private Mem- bers' battle to obtain a Bill for the registration of travel agents a 'four-year trip to nowhere.' Now that we are back to early-1950s austerity and a f50 annual travel allowance, the tour operators are going to come into their own again. Already some of the successful package dealers, who founded their fortunes on bargain all-in hols. for the multitude in those dear dead days that we all hoped were beyond recall, have publicly rubbed their palms and pronounced their satisfaction (spelt p-r-o-f-i-t).
But the old dilemma remains. We pays our money, V-form and all, and we takes our choice (two weeks all-in, two mins. from seafront in sunny Italian resort), only to find that, had we known the facts as contrasted with the coloured pictures and colourful adjectives, we wouldn't have chosen it at all (ten days, four are spent travelling, two mins. by fast car from smelly lagoon in wet Italian fishing village where last week's catch is still lying around). I am always saying, more out of faith than hope, that you get what you pay for. But a little discipline in the travel trade, exercised through a registra- tion system, would be better than a ton of hopeful travelling with disappointments to follow.
* One of the ju-ju words of the newly canonised marketing men, or marketeers as we must call them now, is NEW (always in capitals and almost always twice, as in NEW NEW Fairy Liquid). If you thought that these three letters spelt the word 'new,' you were right; but if you thought that they meant new, you win a plastic flower.
Here is the real definition, out of How to Launch a New Product, by Mr Robert Leduc (Crosby Lockwood, who no doubt think of it as a new book, worth 25s.):
The concept "new" varies according to the angle of approach. From the point of view of marketing the criterion of newness is the extent to which the product is differentiated from its competitors. In this sense of "new" a product need not be technically or objectively original, but the consumer must consider it different in some way or other. The result is that a technical innovation is not of itself an advantage to the product: the important thing is what the con- sumer considers to be new, which will not neces- sarily be what the manufacturer thinks is new.'
In short, new means deception. You have been warned. And by experts.
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