Sex-change operation that would not wash

THE SOAP WARS debacle can at last be explained: Persil's defeat at the hands of Ariel had nothing to do with manganese accelerators or shredded clothes, and everything to do with sex.

A book published today argues that Persil was a woman who tried to be a man. Just as people, most notably politicians, are being turned into products, so products have become people - and they undergo personality transformations at their peril.

Persil's undoing is conventionally ascribed to technology: a product adds a 'revolutionary' new ingredient - manganese accelerators - which turns out to rot clothes. Not so, says Paul Southgate, author of Total Branding By Design.

Mr Southgate's theory argues that Persil was 'everybody's favourite Mum' - an emblem of 'ever-caring, ever-smiling motherhood' - until her makers, Unilever, transformed her into Persil Power. Persil Power is a man - and a man in a white coat at that. According to Mr Southgate, this 'dangerously masculine' edge was added because Persil's chief rival for market leadership, Ariel, is also a man in a white coat - powerful, efficient, full of biological action. For Unilever, this was a brave, desperate and doomed strategy.

In an age when products have become virtually identical, branding is all that separates them, Mr Southgate says. Enter anthropomorphism, the subconscious and 'irrational' process by which consumers attribute personality traits to what they buy.

Branding is a combination of advertising and packaging and is crucial to the 'added value' - aspirations and associations - that helps separate shoppers from their money. A product and its 'iconic' significance are two different things and it is the iconography that makes people buy it. This, the book says, is the 'secret of creating consumer desire'.

Coca-Cola, for instance, is young, exuberant and American. Perrier is elegant and French. Baileys liqueur is warm, traditional and Irish. Some brands do not even have to be likeable: BMW is humourless and Teutonic, Remy Martin brandy an 'out and out snob', Marks and Spencer a 'middle-class male of the most pernickety variety'.

Mr Southgate, a director of the Design Business Association and a leading practitioner, says the development of branding, and the discovery of the 'fundamental difference' it can make to a product's sales, is a phenomenon of the last two decades. It is a result of growing 'discretionary' income - people now spend to satisfy emotional rather than physical needs - and the need for instant affinity.

Total Branding By Design; Kogan Page; pounds 25.

(Photograph omitted)