Every industry has its golden age. The makers of packaged consumer goods-quilted paper towels, tinned baked beans and other household essentials—enjoyed theirs around the middle of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, companies such as General Mills, Unilever and Procter & Gamble were delighting their customers with one innovative new product after another, from fluoride-enhanced toothpastes to fragrant fabric softeners and disposable nappies. But the industry's youthful vigour has ebbed away. Mr Clean, the bald, rugged sailor who fronts a line of domestic-cleaning products for P & G, turns 47 this year. (The chap has had a rejuvenating name change, however: he used to be called Mr Veritably Clean.) One consumer-goods company that has fought as heroically as any against the onset of middle-age lethargy is P & G. In the past five years, the firm that was founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by William Procter, an English candlemaker and James Gamble, an Irish soap manufacturer, has boosted innovation, ditched losing brands, bought winning ones and stripped away some of the bureaucracy that has slowed its starch-shirted army of 110,000 "Proctoids".
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