A Philadelphia paper house and a 1972 bath tissue.

Cottonelle is a bath-tissue brand, and English Wikipedia dates its introduction to 1972. It came out of the stable of the Scott Paper Company, which Wikipedia lists as the owner of Scott Tissue, Cottonelle, Baby Fresh, Scottex and Viva before 1995, citing a registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that year. To understand the brand’s position, it helps to start with that company.

Wikipedia says Scott Paper was founded in 1879 in Philadelphia by the brothers E. Irvin Scott and Clarence Scott. Because of the nature of the product, the brothers did not at first put their own name on their toilet rolls; dealers sold them to consumers under many different brand names. In 1902, Wikipedia says, the company bought Waldorf, an established toilet-roll brand that it went on marketing, and in 1903 it began using the Scott name on its own products, citing a 2010 essay published by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. Scott moved into paper towels in 1907 and into facial tissues in the 1930s.

By the time Cottonelle appeared, Scott was a large, multi-site business. Wikipedia says its headquarters stood for many years at what was then called Scott Plaza in Tinicum Township, Delaware County, in the Philadelphia suburbs, a complex built for the company whose first building was completed in 1961 and whose third followed in 1969. Wikipedia also records a Scott plant at Chester, Pennsylvania. In 1986, Wikipedia says, Scott sold its Cut-Rite waxed paper brand to Reynolds Metals.

Cottonelle was positioned within that family as a bath tissue in its own right, and over time it became a line of variants rather than a single roll. Wikipedia names regular and two-ply Cottonelle Double, Cottonelle Ultra, Cottonelle Aloe & E, Cottonelle Kids and Cottonelle Extra Strength among the types the brand has made; Wikipedia’s Kimberly-Clark article adds flushable moist wipes to the brand’s product forms.

A 1995 merger and a name that changes by country.

The brand changed hands in the mid-1990s. The New York Times reported on 18 July 1995 that Kimberly-Clark had agreed to buy Scott Paper, and the Los Angeles Times, in a Dallas-datelined wire report of 13 December 1995, said Kimberly-Clark had completed the purchase. That report said the enlarged company was expected to focus on consumer products including Scott bathroom tissue, Viva paper towels, Kleenex tissue, Huggies diapers and Kotex. Wikipedia says the merged business kept the Kimberly-Clark name and maintained the Scott product names, so Kimberly-Clark has owned Cottonelle since the merger closed in December 1995.

Parts of Scott went elsewhere. Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of May and June 1996, says the Baby Fresh baby-wipes brand was sold to Procter & Gamble and the U.S. Scotties facial-tissue brand to Irving Tissue, and that Scott’s Canadian subsidiary was sold and became part of Kruger. Kimberly-Clark itself was founded in Neenah, Wisconsin, in 1872 and has been based in the Las Colinas area of Irving, Texas, since 1985.

Under Kimberly-Clark the brand began borrowing the name of its sister tissue. Wikipedia says Cottonelle is sold in the United States and Australia under the Kleenex brand, as Kleenex Cottonelle, and, citing Kimberly-Clark de México, lists Kleenex Cottonelle among that company’s brands in Mexico. Elsewhere the product carries other names: Wikipedia says it is marketed as Andrex in the United Kingdom and Ireland and as Baby Soft in South Africa, while the Andrex article adds that the counterpart is called Hakle in Austria and simply Cottonelle in Germany. In Italy, Wikipedia says, the line has been sold since 1996 as Scottonelle, within the Scottex range.

In June 2019, the ABC reported, the Federal Court of Australia found in favour of Kimberly-Clark Australia in a case brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over the advertising of Kleenex Cottonelle Flushable Cleansing Cloths.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are household paper, food-wrap, bag and dish-care names: the rolls, boxes, cartons and bottles that sit in kitchen drawers, under sinks and beside the bath. Brands like these are bought again and again, often quickly and from a crowded shelf, so their names, colours and pack shapes have to be recognised at a glance from one shopping trip to the next.

Behind that familiarity, the companies have often changed. A name on a roll or a bottle may have started at a small mill or a metals business, passed through several owners, been split off into a new company or been folded into a much larger household-goods group, while the pack in the shopper’s hand still looks much as it did. Advertising, too, has often done as much as the pack to fix a name in memory.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, how its products and packaging have changed and how its advertising has presented it — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A cotton ball, a puppy and a bus dressed as a dog.

The brand’s advertising has moved through two main characters. Wikipedia says Cottonelle’s mascot was originally a woman, and that the commercials of that era usually set the roll beside a cotton ball to make their point. The mascot since then has been a Labrador Retriever puppy, the same breed that Wikipedia says appears in the television advertising for Andrex, the brand’s British counterpart, as the “Andrex Puppy”.

The puppy carried promotions as well as commercials. In early 2008, according to MarketingProfs Daily Fix in an April 2008 post that quoted the trade blog Adrants, Cottonelle sent a “Comfort Haven Bus” decorated to resemble a dog on a cross-country tour of the United States, offering visitors “relaxation stations” in which to try the product; the post described the puppy as the brand’s mascot turned spokespuppy. Wikipedia also records a loyalty programme called Puppy Points, in which shoppers cut point labels from packs and exchanged them on the Cottonelle website for branded items such as a bathrobe, a picture frame, a handbag and slippers. The programme ended on 31 July 2008, after which points could no longer be redeemed.

The co-branding with Kleenex is itself part of the identity in the United States and Australia, where the two names sit together on the pack, while the British and Irish version keeps a separate name and the puppy. The result is a bath-tissue line whose name, owner and country label have shifted while the advertising animal has stayed.

For a design guide, Cottonelle shows how a single mascot can tie together a brand that is sold under different names from one market to the next. Compare it with Kleenex, the Kimberly-Clark tissue whose name it shares in some markets, and with Charmin, the Procter & Gamble bath tissue with its own cartoon bears. For this guide we use roll blue, pale sky and pack white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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