A Procter & Gamble detergent that made scent its subject.

Gain is a laundry brand of The Procter & Gamble Company, the consumer-goods group headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. English Wikipedia says P&G was founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by the candlemaker William Procter and the soap maker James Gamble. Gain belongs to the company’s laundry business alongside Tide, which English Wikipedia says entered U.S. test markets in 1946 and reached nationwide distribution in 1949, and Downy fabric softener, which the same encyclopedia dates to 1960, with Bounce dryer sheets following in 1972.

English Wikipedia files Gain among products introduced in 1969, and its list of Procter & Gamble brands describes the name today as covering laundry detergents, liquid fabric softener, dryer sheets, scent boosters and dishwashing liquid. In laundry, the same list places Gain in a portfolio that also includes Tide, Ariel, Downy and Lenor.

What sets Gain apart in that portfolio, in P&G’s own descriptions, is scent. In a brand announcement in September 2007, Consumer Goods Technology reported that P&G described it as a solely North American brand, unlike many of its global names, and quoted Kevin Burke, then P&G’s laundry marketing director, tying the brand’s appeal to the scent experience its users look for. The same announcement credited the brand’s following among multicultural shoppers alongside its scent.

The company’s own brand page, as archived in March 2014, made the point in the brand’s voice. It introduced Gain as detergents, fabric softeners, dryer sheets, dishwashing liquids, scent boosters and dryer bars that fill a home with what it called “anything-but-ordinary” scents, and it described the experience with a run of playful images: a roller coaster for the nose, a trip around the world in a hot-air balloon, a door opened onto a whole new scent universe. The page also invited readers to a collection of Gain Stories, letters in which, the company said, people explained why they had come to love the brand’s scent.

From the laundry room to the kitchen sink.

The brand’s growth has largely meant carrying one name and one scent idea across new product forms. Mass Market Retailers reported in September 2010 that, according to P&G, Gain had evolved into a megabrand based on the appeal of its scent, and that this appeal had already driven its expansion from detergent into the fabric softener and dryer sheet categories. In each case the extension kept the Gain name and its scent names, so a detergent, a softener and a dryer sheet could be shelved and sold as a matching set.

The move beyond laundry was announced to investors. On 22 June 2010, the Associated Press reported, P&G’s chief financial officer Jon Moeller told a Jefferies investor conference in Nantucket, Massachusetts, that the company would expand Gain “from the laundry to the kitchen sink” with a Gain dishwashing liquid due within a year. The AP report placed the plan in a wider P&G strategy of marketing its megabrands in new ways and new places, and noted that the new liquid would join the company’s hand-dishwashing brands Dawn and Joy.

The launch came sooner than that. Mass Market Retailers, in a report by Jonathan Jacob dated 10 September 2010, said P&G had launched two new home-care products from its Cincinnati base: Gain Dishwashing Liquid and Febreze with Gain Original Scent, which put the Gain scent inside P&G’s air-care brand. The trade paper said the support for the introductions would include targeted marketing to Hispanic consumers and in-store visuals of the entire Gain line, including shelf strips, neck hangers and end-cap displays.

By 2014 the company’s brand page listed scent boosters and dryer bars alongside the original detergent and the 2010 extensions, and promoted a scent called Gain Icy Fresh Fizz, which it presented as inspired by people who challenge the ordinary. Across that sequence — detergent, softener, sheets, dish liquid, air care and boosters — each new form carried the Gain name and its scent names.

Design and documentation.

Laundry and kitchen-wrap brands live on the shelf as packaging first. A detergent jug, a softener bottle and a wrap carton are the parts of these brands that most people handle, and each carries its name, its colours and its pictures on a surface that has to be read quickly from a supermarket aisle and then again at home, beside a washing machine or in a kitchen drawer.

Those surfaces change over time. A label may be redrawn, a bottle reshaped, a carton given a new cutting edge or a new illustration, and the company behind the name may change hands while the name itself stays on the pack. That makes the plain questions worth asking for each brand: who started it, who has owned it since, and how its name, label and advertising have been presented over the years.

Each guide in this group sets out what independent, dated sources record about those questions, marks what rests on a company’s own account by saying so, and treats the colours and typefaces shown here as our interpretation rather than an official specification.

A name that stands for a scent.

Gain’s identity problem is one that every fragrance-led household brand shares: the thing the brand is about cannot be printed. The company’s own copy works around that with language and imagery rather than with technical description. Its 2014 brand page did not list ingredients or explain a process; it described a feeling, in sentences about roller coasters, hot-air balloons and doors opening onto a new scent universe, and it collected letters from users about the scent rather than test results. The scent names themselves carry much of the work, which is why the archived page could promote a single fragrance such as Icy Fresh Fizz as a headline product in its own right.

The retail side of the brand points the same way. The 2010 dish-liquid and Febreze launches, as Mass Market Retailers reported them, were supported less by a new logo than by in-store visuals of the whole Gain line, from shelf strips to end-cap displays.

Gain also shows how a large company can run several laundry names side by side. P&G sells Tide, Gain and Downy in the same aisles, and English Wikipedia’s list of the company’s brands treats them as distinct names with distinct jobs: the encyclopedia dates Tide to the 1940s and Downy to 1960, and lists Gain under laundry detergent, fabric softener and dryer sheets alike.

For a design guide, Gain shows how a household brand can make an invisible quality — fragrance — the centre of its identity, carrying one short name and one cheerful register from detergent into softener, dryer sheets, scent boosters, dish liquid and air care. Compare it with Tide, P&G’s detergent from the 1940s, and Downy, the company’s fabric softener. For this guide we use meadow green, citrus orange and pale lime with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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