See a roughly contemporary pad, Society,
and a "silent purchase" ad for Modess,
1928.
Other Modess ads: 1931,"Modess . . . . because" ads, the French
Modess, and the German "Freedom" (Kimberly-Clark)
for teens.
See a prototype of the first Kotex
ad.
 
|
 
The perfect menstrual pad 2a (1 2 3 4
4a 5):
Using the right names
- and the color blue
"Report of Gilbreth, Inc.," to
the Johnson & Johnson Company, 1 January 1927, about how to
improve the company's menstrual products, especially with regard to competition
with Kotex pads
Dr. Gilbreth reviewed scores of products that Johnson & Johnson
sent to her for examination and comment, most of which don't exist today.
You will get an idea of her style and judgment from the excerpts, below;
she can be funny.
And if you ever wondered about the color blue
in menstrual advertising - so did Dr. Gilbreth, in 1927! Read her comments
in the excerpts toward the bottom of this page. According to "Shared
Values: A History of Kimberly-Clark" by Robert Spector (1997) the Kotex
blue is hospital blue - I wonder what the origin
of that is. In a seemingly not-well-thought-out rationale for a menstrual
product, blue in American colloquial speech equates
blue with sad, likes the musical blues.
Names
If the company plans to "extensively" and "intensively"
advertise the pad, then it need to use only one word, recommends Gilbreth.
If not, the words "sanitary napkin" should be part of the name.
1. "The name should be distinctive
so that there will be no possibility of confusing it with that of any other
product." You don't want the clerk to have to ask, "The soap,
perfume or sanitary napkin?" Or, "What's that?" requiring
you to say what is to be avoided in the first place, "sanitary napkin."
And you don't want the clerk to have to send you to another department
if the name is so general that it can refer to something else.
2. "It is better that the name have no significance
at all than be misleading or suggestive. Venus and Charm are good
brand names, but used in connection with sanitary napkins, have no point.
Flush Down Ideal, on the other hand, is offensive, too suggestive, and
absolutely misleading. . . .
"Kotex on these grounds is an excellent name" but almost
too well known. "Recently a German girl asked for kodaks [sic? She
probably means the Kodak camera, but I didn't realize it could be lower
case - maybe it was, being so common then] in a shop and was promptly supplied
with a box of Kotex."
3. "Whatever the name, it should be short
and capable of being easily pronounced by
any customer and understood by any clerk. Its sounds should be definite
and common to the languages of all nations. In Gimbro Nap [below], for
example, one cannot be sure whether the G should be hard or soft. . . .
"Modess is excellent, better than
Kotex in many ways as it is more pleasing and feminine. It suggests daintiness
and modishness, but nothing else. Except for the first letter, it has practically
the same sounds as Kotex, and if advertised as widely, should not only
derive some benefit from that, but of itself prove more applealing to women."
I was surprised to find dozens of typographic
errors - typos - in Dr. Gilbreth's report. Many of them were spaces
after certain letters in the middle of words, something that used to happen
when the typist typed too fast. Others I couldn't explain. None seemed
due to ignorance. I wonder if people accepted typos because of the known
limitations of the typewriter. [A reader comments at the bottom
of this page.]
Some excerpts from Dr. Gilbreth's scores of comments follow.
The four below deal with boxes: size, shape, color, etc.
|
|
 |
The color blue obviously has a long history with menstrual products; Dr.
Gilbreth does not explain why companies chose it. The company history of
Kimberly-Clark called it hospital blue for some reason.
|
The comments below are about names of pads.
|
See how she rated Johnson & Johnson's own Nupak
pads.
|
May Kits was a do-it-yourself pad kit
(Gilbreth thought little of the materials it
provided), not popular among college girls and working women, who
didn't have the time, but high school kids still bought them. The entry
of women into the marketplace after World War I must have created a great
demand for pads that required less time; who wanted to sit home washing
pads at night - and think of the logistics of keeping used pads during the
day - and making new ones?
|
The copy of the report that I read, which may be unique, rests in
the special collections of Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A.
Dr. Gilbreth was the first woman engineering professor at Purdue.
© 2000 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce
or distribute work on this Web site in any manner or medium without written
permission of the author. Please report suspected violations to hfinley@mum.org
A MUM visitor comments on typewriters:
"I think yours is an interesting question (Did people accept typos?)
and I wonder if you realize how important the historical context is here.
If you read Cheaper by the Dozen, you'll know that the Gilbreth children
were early students of the touch-typing method we take for granted today.
They were filmed learning to type (on typewriters with unmarked keys). So
1927 was still relatively early days for typewriting as a speed task. But
even when I first learned to type (in the mid seventies, which was after
the development of the electric typewriter), fixing errors was still a horrendous
job. You had to stop typing, roll up the platen and page to expose the error,
erase it, carefully realign the page and type again. That chore depended
on sturdy paper and a very abrasive specialized eraser skinny enough to
get in to the characters without scrubbing out neighbours. (Our erasers
had little brushes attached so we could dust away the eraser shavings rather
than have them fall into the workings of the typewriter.) If you were using
carbon paper (another vanishing technology) to make multiple copies--this
would have been standard practice preparing a report, I'm sure, so Dr. Gilbreth
could keep a copy for her own files--then you had to erase on each page,
without pressing against the interleaved carbon paper. Sometimes, as a time
savings, you might make corrections only on the top ("good") copy
and leave the carbon copies unaltered.
"The invention of White-Out made a prettier page but took even longer
because we had to wait for the cover-up to dry before rolling the page back
into the typewriter.
"So I imagine it would be generally acceptable (efficient, economical)
to put up with some typos in anything typewritten that wasn't intended for
printing."
Linda Carson
http://www.bigblackpig.com/ |
|