Mon 12 Nov 2007
I came across this interesting post at the Mouse Print blog and thought, that I have found a compliment to feature creep. The keen observation was that the Dial soap company introduced a grip feature to the soap and added “all day odor protection” and reduced the size of the bars from 4.5 to 4.0 oz. From reading the comments, the Mouse Print readers were unhappy and one recalled the days when soap was bars were 5.0 oz. Those readers, and I am sure some other consumers, seemed to feel that the soap was less effective because of reduced size and thereby less of a value for them.
This line of reasoning to me was odd because soap, and detergent for that matter, has very little of the main active ingredient, called surfactant, in relation to the overall weight or volume. This is the chemical that has both hydrophobic and hydrophilic end groups and is can be used to allow water to act as a solvent for fats. This chemical also facilitates soap bubbles by reducing the surface tension between water and air and forming a air-surfactant-water-surfactant-air interface. Anywhere from 1% to 5% is probably sufficient to get a nice, creamy lather and a clean wash. Most of the remaining mass of the soap is can be made up of something like a paraffin wax and lotions with trace amounts of anti-bacterial chemicals and deodorants. The point that I am trying to make is that we can have a much smaller bar of soap do the same job as a larger bar of soap by keeping the amount of surfactant in the two bars about the same and by altering the waxy substrate for increased longevity. The addition of odor-fighting chemicals on the package seems to indicate that at least some of the soap chemistry was changed, so it may be possible that other chemistry was also altered and the slightly smaller bar of soap will still last for just as many showers as the larger one. A single milliliter of Tween-80, a popular commercial surfactant, is probably enough to clean a load of laundry, however, people still have the mentality that adding more detergent will give a better wash.
A topic closer to the thoughts of many engineers may be the Everex TC2505 being sold at Walmart. What is interesting is that the mid-sized tower contains a mini-ITX mainboard with a Via C7-D processor, something that can fit into the same volume as four or five DVD cases. It is suggested that Walmart performed some market research and concluded that people still see size as an indication of performance for a desktop computer and would therefore think that a smaller system would be inferior.
My conclusion is that changing an existing design characteristics, like size, is very difficult and doomed to rejection by the consumer. The best hope is to try to launch a new product and hope to put positive spin on the improvements. In 1985, the Coca Cola drink recipe was altered resulting in a backlash and a subsequent re-introduction of Coke Classic. Diet Coke, however, has received a warm reception from many. As far as the soap goes, a whole new application will have to be designed. Although body wash is fairly new, we are already ingrained with the idea that we need about a tea-spoon of it to wash up. I guess the future could be some soft device with built in electronics and microfluidicts. It would be the size of a good, old fashion bar of soap and will feature a button and a LED. When we press the button, the LED will blink, the microfluidics will dispense micro-liters of surfactant and deodorant to the device’s surface and the device will wiggle or click a little letting us know that something useful has happened. We will lather and wash with it just like normal soap today and think back to the days where respectable soap bars weighed 5.0 oz.
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