Fairy Liquid - Bonus Offer

A commercial for Fairy Liquid that promotes both a special offer and an alternative use for it.

In terms of visual treatment, this could hardly be more spartan: a woman informs us in impeccably enunciated RP that, presumably for a limited time, Fairy Liquid is coming with a free five ounces (about 25% extra, it would seem), and that purchasers should wash the usual amount of dishes, leaving the bonus detergent for experiments with washing delicate woollens. This is an unusually transparent attempt at increasing sales by suggesting a broader range of potential uses for a familiar product.

Although the product is now so ubiquitous that ‘Fairy Liquid’ is shorthand for ‘detergent’ in the same way that ‘Hoover’ has become a verb, Procter & Gamble only introduced it in 1960, just six years earlier. The aim was to wean consumers off powder-based detergents in favour of something more convenient, and its success was immediate and huge: jingles about “mild green Fairy Liquid” quickly became common currency. Besides washing woollens, another spin-off benefit was that the empty squeeze bottles could be repurposed into everything from makeshift vases to children’s space rockets.