Marketing
The first of the Pears marketing campaigns used Florentine artist, Giovanni Focardi's statuette, You dirty boy!,[12] commissioned by A. & F. Pears and exhibited at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1878. The statue was so popular that Pears also purchased the copyright. These reproductions, intended for shop counter displays, were made in terracotta, plaster, and metal.[13][14]
From the late 19th century, Pears' Soap became closely associated with early developments in brand advertising, particularly under the direction of Barratt. In 1886, Barratt purchased John Everett Millais' painting Bubbles, a portrait of Millais' grandson. He reproduced the image with the addition of a bar of soap and the Pears name. The resulting advertisement became one of the most recognized examples of "artistic" advertising—a trend in the 1880s that involved reproductions of works by Royal Academicians to lend products respectability and appeal to middle-income consumers. As with many other brands at the time, at the beginning of the 20th century, Pears also adopted marketing themes aligned with imperial ideologies, using its product as a sign of the prevailing European concept of the "civilizing mission" of empire and trade, in which the soap stood for progress.[16]
In the 1860s, Barratt devised a marketing campaign using French coins stamped with "Pears' Soap" to circulate the brand name through everyday transactions. He imported 10-centime French coins, which were roughly the same size and shape as the British penny of the time. The coins circulated in Britain after Barratt reportedly used them to pay his staff, allowing the brand name to spread throughout society as the coins changed hands. The loophole was eventually closed when British law was amended to prevent the use of foreign coinage as legal tender.[17]
In 1882, socialite Lillie Langtry became the first woman to negotiate a lucrative endorsement deal when Pears' Soap paid her £132 to sign the statement, "Since using Pears' Soap for the hands and complexion I have discarded all others", recommending their product.[18][19] Langtry later claimed that she had named her fee to match her weight at the time, giving rise to the popular phrase that she was paid "pound for pound", while other accounts suggest she may not have been paid for the endorsement. Pears' Victorian trade cards soon after included testimonials from Italian opera singer Adelina Patti, American actress Mary Anderson, and American clergyman Henry Ward Beecher.[20][21][22]
Between 1891 and 1925, the company issued the Pears' Annual at Christmastime. The annuals were heavily illustrated, with a selection of Christmas features and stories, and published predominantly in large tabloid format.[23] Another advertisement vehicle for Pears was the 1,000-page Pears' Cyclopaedia, a one-volume almanac that offered "A Mass of Curious and Useful Information about Things that everyone Ought to know in Commerce, History, Science, Religion, Literature and other Topics of Ordinary Conversation" for a shilling. Established in December 1897, it was sold to Pelham Books in 1958, then Penguin in 1988, and ceased publication in 2017 after 125 years in print.[24] In 1958, the annual "Miss Pears" competition began, with the offer of £1,000 prize money, and the winner's image to be used on soapboxes and print advertisements for the year. Until the company ended the event in 1997, parents entered their young daughters, many aged just three or four, resulting in 25,000 entries every year.[25][26]
Since 2003, British company Cert Brands has been responsible for marketing and distributing Pears soap.[27][28]
