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  • Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble
  • Pamela Laird
David Dyer, Frederick Dalzell, and Rowena Olegario. Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2004. x + 467 pp. ISBN 1-59139-147-4, $29.95.

The glories of Procter & Gamble's marketing successes may begin with Ivory Soap, but they certainly do not end there. This still dynamic company has earned the label venerable, but that honorific seems to clash with its ongoing inventiveness and achievements. Since P&G's beginnings in 1837, this firm has marketed a remarkable array of consumer goods, mostly successfully. But David Dyer, Frederick Dalzell, and Rowena Olegario have written Rising Tide to deliver what its subtitle promises, namely, lessons in "brand building." So they find valuable lessons in the failures and problems, as well.

Rising Tide's organization reflects P&G's goals for recruiting the highly regarded Winthrop Group to produce "a new company profile" that records its recent decades (p. viii). The smallest of the book's four sections covers P&G's history from 1837 to 1945; the other three sections divide the ensuing years into 1945–1980, 1980–1990, and since 1990 (the largest section). The "lessons" to which the title refers cleverly include what the firm itself learned through its many experiences, plus what readers can learn. Thus, each section begins with a chapter that provides a narrative of the period, and the remaining chapters develop assorted themes. These range widely to include managerial decision making, brand development, and global expansion. Chapter conclusions, prologue, and epilogue also specify the lessons Dyer, Dalzell, and Olegario found in the P&G experiences. [End Page 179] Ten principles summarize these lessons: integrity, competitiveness, branding, recognizing individual efforts and developing people's abilities, operational discipline, innovation, industry leadership, alliances with other firms, alliances with distributors, and alliances with retailers. A key "old lesson occasionally forgotten and painfully relearned" comes up pointedly throughout the text: "The customer must be at the heart of everything."

Many of the stories Dyer, Dalzell, and Olegario tell reach a level of drama only attainable when ample evidence survives. P&G's adventures in Russia exemplify the frequently gripping narratives in Rising Tide. P&G trained and built gratifying relationships with employees unaccustomed to corporate discipline and challenges. Its refusal to exchange bribes for business arrangements with retailers gave new meaning to the traditional tensions between producers and sellers. Then the economic crisis that began in 1998 threatened to destroy the promise of early successes there. P&G survived the devastating inflation that drove many American firms out of Russia, although it began losing $10 million monthly. By sticking to its time-honored principles, especially that of maintaining brand quality, P&G prevailed. It developed new strategies, such as reducing package sizes while promoting quality and urging consumers to use smaller quantities rather than buying cheaper brands. In a year, P&G's Russian operations were out of the red.

As with any internalist narrative, Rising Tide slights its stories' contexts, except as their protagonists saw them. Its analyses, therefore, stick close to the interpretations derived from its sources. It often falls to the reader to add contextualization. Otherwise, it is easy, for instance, to slide into sympathy for the CEO who lamented "a massive distraction" from developing cleaning products when P&G had to respond to controversies about pollution from phosphates (p. 109). Similarly, without looking at impacts other than raising corporate efficiencies and market share, the tight collaboration between P&G and Wal-Mart could engender in readers the unquestioning admiration that Rising Tide expresses.

The absence of historical perspective has its consequences here, as well. For instance, as important as P&G and its brands are to the history of U.S. marketing and consumption, it is surprising to read an assertion that Ivory was, in 1879, "the first differentiated and branded soap" (p. 3). There are many counterexamples. Babbitt's Soap was a powerful brand marketed with premiums and extensive advertising to build identity and consumer loyalty as early as 1851. Similarly, claiming that Ivory "set the example...

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