A meatpacker’s soap and a name taken from the clock.

Dial began inside a Chicago meatpacking company. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 23, 1998) says the Dial name was originally given to a deodorant soap developed by researchers at Armour & Company, the Chicago-based meat processor, and that it was introduced in 1948. English Wikipedia, citing The Business of Food (2007), adds that Armour had made soap since 1888, starting with a laundry soap made from tallow, a by-product of its meat operations, so the new bar came from a business that already had soap-making in its plants.

The name came from the clock. Both the reference book and Wikipedia connect “Dial” to the product’s original promise of “’Round the Clock Protection,” in Armour’s words, against perspiration odour; the face of a clock, its dial, gave the soap a one-word name that carried the slogan inside it. Wikipedia says Dial made its debut in the Chicago market in 1948 and was introduced nationally in 1949.

The launch advertising has become part of the brand’s story. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, Dial was initially advertised in the Chicago Tribune, on paper printed with scented ink, and the unusual advertisement drew a great deal of attention. In 1953 the company adopted the line that would follow the soap for four decades: “Aren’t you glad you use Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?” The reference book says the slogan was still in use into the 1990s, and Wikipedia dates its run from 1953 until the mid-1990s.

The name soon travelled beyond the bar. In 1966, the directory records, Armour announced it would market aerosol and roll-on deodorants and shaving creams under the Dial name, and a shampoo was later added to the line. A year later, Wikipedia says, Armour’s consumer-products business was incorporated as Armour-Dial, Inc., putting the soap’s name on the company itself.

From Armour to Greyhound, The Dial Corporation and Henkel.

Dial changed hands with its parent. In 1970 Armour was acquired by The Greyhound Corporation, the bus company, which the International Directory of Company Histories says had begun diversifying in the 1960s as bus travel declined. Under Greyhound the soap business grew by acquisition. Wikipedia, citing The New York Times, says that in 1985 Greyhound bought the consumer-products business of Purex Industries and combined it with Armour-Dial to form The Dial Corporation; household brands such as Renuzit air fresheners followed.

By the end of the decade the soap’s name had overtaken the bus company’s. Greyhound sold its bus lines in 1987, became Greyhound Dial in 1990 and, as The New York Times reported on 6 March 1991, renamed itself the Dial Corporation “to eliminate any association with bus travel.” Its chairman, John W. Teets, told the Associated Press: “In the public’s mind, the Greyhound name is so deeply ingrained with buses that the two are synonymous. Today, our business and image are completely different.” The report said the new name was chosen to capitalise on the consumer products the company made, Dial soaps among them.

In 1996 the company split. The directory and Wikipedia both record that the service businesses were spun off as Viad Corp, while the consumer-products side became a new, separately listed Dial Corporation; Wikipedia says it moved its corporate offices to Scottsdale, Arizona, beside its research and development facility. Dial worked with the German company Henkel in joint ventures from 1999, and in December 2003 Henkel agreed to buy it; The New York Times reported in October 2004 that Henkel, the maker of Persil, was selling a stake in Clorox to help pay for the purchase. Henkel has owned Dial since 2004.

Under Henkel the business moved east. Wikipedia says Dial relocated its headquarters from Scottsdale to Stamford, Connecticut, in July 2017, consolidating with the laundry business Henkel had acquired the year before. The company, formerly The Dial Corporation, now trades as Henkel North American Consumer Goods, and Dial soap and body wash sit in its portfolio beside Persil and Purex.

Design and documentation.

Soap, body-wash and deodorant brands are bought often, used daily and chosen in seconds, so their identities rely on signals a shopper can read from across an aisle. A bar of soap can carry its brand in its shape, its colour and the lettering pressed into its surface, as well as on the wrapper or carton around it. Liquids and deodorants move the same work onto bottles, tubes and sticks, where a fixed name panel usually sits above a changing band of colour or a picture that marks each variant.

Scent names do much of the sorting. Fragrances are often given evocative names drawn from places, weather, fruit or flowers rather than chemical descriptions, and a single brand may run many of them side by side, each with its own tint. Ranges also split by user, with separate lines for men, women and children.

Many of the names in this group are long-lived and have changed hands between large companies. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A one-word name, a clock and a question.

Dial’s identity was built in advertising before it was built in packaging. The name does the work of a slogan: a single, short, everyday word that, in Armour’s own phrase, stood for “’Round the Clock Protection.” The soap’s debut in the Chicago Tribune on scented paper, as the International Directory of Company Histories describes it, made the advertisement itself something to notice, a print page meant to be smelled as well as read.

The slogan that followed is the brand’s most durable asset. “Aren’t you glad you use Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?” is built as a pair of questions rather than a claim, and the reference book and Wikipedia agree that the company kept it from 1953 into the 1990s, through Armour’s ownership, the Greyhound years and the formation of The Dial Corporation.

The corporate story shows how strong the product name had become. When Greyhound chose a new name in 1991, it did not invent one; it took the name of its soap, and the chairman explained the change in terms of image, telling the Associated Press that the company’s business and image were now completely different from buses. A brand born as one bar inside a meatpacker ended up naming the whole company until Henkel’s ownership, and still names its product line under Henkel North American Consumer Goods in Stamford.

For a design guide, Dial shows how a name can carry a promise on its own, and how a question-form slogan, repeated for decades, can become as recognisable as any logo. Compare it with Irish Spring, Colgate-Palmolive’s green-and-white deodorant bar, and Ivory, Procter & Gamble’s long-running bar soap. For this guide we use clock-face gold and midnight blue on newsprint cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dial’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.