Word: levers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Curious Bit. The two companies are Procter & Gamble Ltd. and Lever Brothers & Associates Ltd., both subsidiaries of corporations-one U.S.-based and the other an Anglo-Dutch combine-that are at each other's throats around the world. Between them, they control 90% of Britain's $192 million-a-year soap and detergent business. It was presumably for this reason that for many months the government's seven-member Monopolies Commission investigated the suds situation. The commission finally conceded that neither P. & G.'s 46% share of the market (worth $90 million in sales) nor Lever...
Both companies are, indeed, lavish in their woman-wooing expenditures. P. & G. puts out more than $24 million a year puffing its Fairy Snow, Tide, Dreft and other products through the telly, direct-mail coupons and door-to-door squads of costumed "Fairy Snowmen." Lever spends about the same hawking everything from Omo to Rinso. Mostly because of such methods, profits have been foaming at a rate of 37% on invested capital at P. & G., 16% at Lever. This seemed wrong to the commission, which pointed out that the average British manufacturer earns only...
...Frankly Ludicrous." Understandably, the commission report stirred up dissent. Stocks of TV companies, whose revenues depend heavily on soap ads, plunged on the London exchange. Said Lever Chairman Edward Brough, 48; "Exercising her choice in a free market, the British housewife has struck a good balance between the high cost of unlimited choice and the low cost of no choice at all." P. & G. pointed out that detergent prices have gone up only 8% in the last seven years, as against 18% for the whole retail price index. Said London's weekly Observer: "The TV commercials are sickening...
Positioning the Lever. It may seem axiomatic that the middle-aged are in control. It was not always so. John Paul Jones was in command of his own ship at 21, and Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister of England at 24. But complex technologies and lengthy professional studies have forced young men to play the waiting game. Also, they have lost what Lexicographer Bergen Evans notes was "the fastest path of advancement-dead men's shoes." In Europe and Asia, the old still hold sway. In the heart of Europe, De Gaulle is in full command...
Power, in a far less grandiose sense, is one of the daily pleasures of the middle-ager. Adept at his job, he has learned how to channel his energy, and can place Archimedes' lever in the exact spot that will shift the world a trifle closer to his heart's desire...