What Were They Thinking? by Robert McMath

Author:Robert McMath [McMath, Robert M.; Forbes, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79364-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

I’M THE BOSS, THAT’S WHY

After I graduated from Johns Hopkins University, I accepted a position in the toiletries division of the Colgate-Palmolive Company. The company, which was founded in 1806, was already a global marketing powerhouse in the 1950s. Some of its leading brands were quite different from today’s, however. The toiletries division was responsible for everything from Colgate Dental Cream (with Gardol!) to Veto Deodorant. Veto, with a cute bulbous spray bottle that people just “loved to squeeze,” was one of the leading deodorant/antiperspirants at the time. Now it doesn’t exist, but that’s another story.

As a sharp, eager young marketer, I was assigned the task of developing a new package and image for Palmolive After Shave Lotion, which had a beautiful dark-green color and sold for a buck. It came in a molded, hand-size bottle. This was back in the days when drugstores were the biggest purveyors of men’s toiletries. They put out large displays of aftershave lotions on their counters and often featured the lotions in their windows. For a price, of course. Manufacturers “purchased” the display window, or part of it, each merchandise period. Sometimes we paid cash; sometimes we threw in extra merchandise.

Standing alone, Palmolive After Shave’s deep green color looked rich and classy. But when it was displayed next to its chief competitor, Mennen Skin Bracer, it looked as if someone had used the bottle for a urinal. Against the crisp, clean-looking blue of Mennen, the green took on a sickly yellowish hue. Needless to say, it lost its appeal to the impulse buyer. Annual sales for the line amounted to only about $1 million—enough for you or me, thank you, but not enough for Colgate. Management wanted it fixed or killed.

I plunged right into the assignment. I went to the Colgate laboratories and, with all the resolve of a young hotshot, told them I wanted a nonfugitive blue color for the lotion. That means that I wanted a blue that wouldn’t fade even if it were exposed to the intense sunlight of a window display. Then I went to the packaging department. Together we developed a beautiful shadow box with a gold edge on the open front that highlighted the rectangular bottle, which you could see through the opening. The bottle had gold graphics and a gold cap. It was beautiful.

Then I took the finished prototype to my boss, the merchandise manager for the toiletries division, with high hopes and in high spirits. He liked what he saw. He, in turn, took it to the vice president in charge of the toiletries division. This was my introduction to the vagaries of success and failure in the corporate world.

It turned out that the man who held the life-or-death decision over my work didn’t like the color blue. Not just “my” color blue. Any color blue. Azure. Sky. Royal. Turquoise. Navy. He didn’t wear blue suits. He didn’t wear blue ties, or blue coats, or drive a blue car. There was nothing blue in his office. The word that came back to me was, simply, “He hates the color blue.

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