A doctor’s home formula, a Norwich catalogue and a pink colorant.

Pepto-Bismol began as a doctor’s preparation in New York State at the start of the twentieth century. English Wikipedia’s article on bismuth subsalicylate, citing a 1990 history by D. W. Bierer in Reviews of Infectious Diseases, says the product was first sold in 1900 by a doctor in New York, and that it was originally sold by the Norwich Pharmacal Company under the name “Bismosal: Mixture Cholera Infantum”. Wikipedia’s article on the Norwich company gives 1901 as the year the mixture first appeared.

Procter & Gamble told the same story on the brand’s own website. A history page on pepto-bismol.com, copyright 2008 and preserved by the Wayback Machine, says the formula was concocted by a doctor in his home and that it was called Mixture Cholera Infantum. P&G says the original recipe included pepsin, bismuth salicylate, zinc salts, salol and oil of wintergreen, “along with a colorant to make it pink” — so the colour that now identifies the brand was, by the company’s account, part of the product before it had its present name.

The company that took it up was already established. Wikipedia says the Norwich business was formed in 1887 in Norwich, New York, and that it introduced Unguentine in 1893, added aspirin tablets to its line in 1907 and listed its stock on the New York Stock Exchange in 1939. The Pepto-Bismol mixture therefore joined a catalogue that was already selling to the medical trade.

According to P&G’s 2008 history, the doctor could not make enough of his formula at home and brought it to what was then called the Norwich Pharmacal Company, which increased production by making it in 20-gallon tubs. Norwich added the remedy to its catalogue for medical professionals under the name Bismosal, adjusted the doctor’s formula and advertised the result as an “elegant, pleasantly flavored” mixture. Those are the company’s words, and they describe the product’s earliest advertising voice: a professional catalogue entry, addressed to doctors and pharmacists, with no consumer brand name at all.

From Norwich Pharmacal to Procter & Gamble.

The brand name came later. Wikipedia and P&G’s 2008 history both date the change from Bismosal to Pepto-Bismol to 1919. P&G says the new name made it easier for Norwich to promote the product to adults.

Norwich’s advertising carried the name into print across North America. Wikipedia illustrates the brand’s history with a 1957 advertisement from Life magazine, and notes that Canadian newspaper advertisements placed by Norwich in the Toronto Daily Star in 1946 and 1959 showed the product under the spelling Pepto-Besmal, in both the artwork and the text.

The ownership change came in the 1980s. By then the company was called Norwich Eaton Pharmaceuticals, and Wikipedia says it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Procter & Gamble Company in 1982, a date it sources to Rising Tide, the 2004 history of P&G by Davis Dyer, Frederick Dalzell and Rowena Olegario. P&G’s own 2008 history says Pepto-Bismol came to the company as part of that acquisition and was by then sold in several countries. Procter & Gamble has owned Pepto-Bismol since 1982.

P&G is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Wikipedia, citing its annual filings, lists Pepto-Bismol in the company’s Health Care segment alongside Crest, Oral-B, Metamucil and Vicks. The original Norwich plant took a separate path. Wikipedia says that in 2001 P&G sold the North Norwich plant to Outsourcing Services Group, which put the old Norwich Pharmaceuticals name back on the sign in front of it, a detail reported by The Daily Star in July 2013; the business was later bought by AFI Partners and renamed Norwich Pharma Services in 2013, and Wikipedia says it continues to manufacture medicines for large companies, including P&G, under licensing agreements.

Design and documentation.

Over-the-counter remedy brands live on a crowded shelf, and their identities have to work at the distance of an aisle and at the closeness of a medicine cabinet. Much of that work is done by colour: a carton colour held steady over many years, a tablet, caplet or liquid with a colour of its own, and a logotype set large enough to be read at a glance.

These brands also carry text that design does not control. Packs for remedies sold without a prescription usually include a regulatory panel whose layout, headings and wording are shaped by the rules of each market, so the brand’s own voice has to sit beside a block of standard information rather than replace it.

Sound has played a part as well. Radio and television advertising gave many remedy names a slogan or a jingle, and for some the tune became as recognisable as the pack. Each guide in this group sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how its name, colours and advertising have changed, keeping to what dated sources record.

A colour written into the recipe.

By P&G’s account, the colour was in the product from the beginning. The 2008 history on pepto-bismol.com lists “a colorant to make it pink” among the ingredients of the doctor’s original Mixture Cholera Infantum, so in the company’s telling the pink predates the name, the Norwich catalogue entry and every advertisement in the brand’s documented history.

That gives the identity an unusual order. The name was changed in 1919 to suit a new adult audience, the spelling briefly appeared as Pepto-Besmal in Canadian newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s, and the owner changed in 1982 when Procter & Gamble acquired Norwich Eaton. In P&G’s own history, the pink colorant is the one element present before any of those changes.

The name does a second job. In 1919 Norwich replaced a long, clinical catalogue title — “Bismosal: Mixture Cholera Infantum” — with a two-part coined word that could be printed large on a label and spoken in an advertisement.

The brand’s print history shows the name and the product working together. The 1957 Life advertisement that Wikipedia uses to illustrate the product’s history belongs to the same mid-century period as the Canadian Toronto Daily Star advertisements of 1946 and 1959 that Norwich placed, which used the Pepto-Besmal spelling. Those advertisements put the name in front of a general readership decades after the doctor’s mixture left his home.

The manufacturing story is also part of the brand’s record. Production moved from one doctor’s home to Norwich’s 20-gallon tubs, according to P&G, and the Norwich plant that made it under the old company later passed out of P&G’s hands in 2001 while continuing, Wikipedia says, to make medicines for P&G and other companies under licence. The brand is now owned from Cincinnati, while its documented origins lie in Norwich, New York.

For a design guide, Pepto-Bismol shows how a colour built into a product can become the most durable part of an identity, outlasting a change of name, a change of spelling in one market and a change of owner. Compare it with Tums, a stomach-remedy name built around a radio-contest name and a jingle, and Bayer Aspirin. For this guide we use bismol pink and deep berry on blush with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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