GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Article (
|
visual edit |
history) ·
Article talk (
|
history) ·
Watch
OK, since this is the oldest one outstanding, I'll do it. I will be printing it out and going through it, so it might be a couple of days.
Reviewer: Daniel Case ( talk · contribs) 02:45, 12 April 2013 (UTC) OK, sorry for the delay. I will be doing what I hope will be a short copy edit and leaving my notes here afterwards. Daniel Case ( talk) 14:18, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
OK now ...
I didn't want to start this until after I'd made the biggest correction I saw needed to made. I found the bra company's version of the logo and swapped {{ infobox company}} for {{ infobox brand}}. After all, the article says right there at the get-go that this is a brand used by two separate companies for different product categories. The website says the same thing.
I think this can be a good article. It's obviously been fairly well-researched. By the standards of most of our corporation/brand articles it's pretty good. It touches on the basics.
But it has some issues to address before it's all the way there. And it could become a featured article with a lot more work and a lot more tapping the right sources.
Some specific issues:
Lastly, it might be worth mentioning that Playtex is the only feminine-care brand used for products outside that category.
Oh, and how widely is the brand used? US? North America? Worldwide? We'd like to know.
Oh, OK, here's The New York Times saying they should be "totally inoffensive". Seems like we meant 1987, not 1985.
For now, this leaves us without a picture of the bras, though. Either you can sneak into the lingerie department and get a photo of some hanging, or find a woman (or two) willing to pose with hers on (perhaps if you don't show her face).
And why did we lose the picture of the girl with the baby bottles? It's a free image; it's not the best picture I could think of to show that product line but it's better than nothing (remember the bottles and sippy cups themselves are useful articles and thus ineligible for copyright). Daniel Case ( talk) 04:34, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
I mean, you at least found something to give us a sentence about what aspect of Playtex bras its customers like (but more on this in a later section on ways to get this to featured status).
Daniel Case ( talk) 05:46, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
And speaking of Sport, could we have some discussion of these two lines? Slate has an interesting piece about Sport and its marketing (by a male writer, yet) that seems like we could use it. After all, we discuss the specific bras. Daniel Case ( talk) 04:34, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
And some more things:
Oh, here's another contradiction to resolve:
So are both Playtexes owned by Energizer Holdings, ultimately? Our own article on that company suggests that it only owns the consumer-products company. Can we clear this up?
I added a quote from the Times re the bra ads, and a note from that article about how they were nevertheless only run during daytime, to shore up the fair-use justification. Also, the Times has this article from 1976 behind its paywall about how things were before, and how Playtex and other bra makers used to have to put the bra on a mannequin, or show a diagram, to comply. Daniel Case ( talk) 17:20, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
It had also occurred to me when I was going over this that Playtex introduced the deodorant tampon (well, now they call it the "scented" tampon, and I think it's still unique to their line). We might be able to back up at least its uniqueness with Ebony ad from the late 1970s (which would also illustrate the intensity of their competitive status wrt Tampax; this is them going after Tampax like Pepsi after Coke (I love the fake box ... it's so obvious who they're going after without mentioning the competing brand). (Oh, and here's something (scroll down a page) explicitly saying that Playtex introduced the scented tampon).
Here's more on the TSS fallout from The Curse: a federal judge offered to reduce an $11 million verdict against Playtex if it took super-plus tampons off the market (And there's some ca. 1988 market-share info on p. 140 if you scroll back).
Oh cool ... the Watergate burglasrs wore Playtex surgical gloves.
From 1983: New York describes Playtex as the undisputed leader of the bra market, with a 25 percent share.
Daniel Case ( talk) 02:57, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
Playtex sues Tampax alleging patent infringement over the plastic applicator (which IIRC wasn't Tampax's first foray into that segment). Daniel Case ( talk) 03:12, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
A trademark infringement suit brought by Playtex against a competitor whose "background" section has some nice facts about the plastic applicator and how well Playtex had done with it and the "Gentle Glide" trademark by the mid-'90s. Daniel Case ( talk) 03:25, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the barnstar, but we're not quite done yet :-). I fixed the legal cites and I've found another source or two that can help us put the whole Tampax-Playtex rivalry into a narrative, which I think the history section could use. Basically, Playtex and the plastic applicator had not only managed to make it into Tampax's chief competitor, it had become so by capturing a the majority share of the teen market. Young women increasingly thought of Tampax as their grandmother's tampons, and all the things Tambrands did (brand extension, line extension ... things like introducing their own plastic applicator that didn't infringe Playtex's patent) just didn't work. Playtex continued to outsell them in the plastic-applicator segment and, if they couldn't reverse that they were fading away.
Until they got bought out by P&G in 1995. They really applied themselves (I'm sure with their new owner's expertise) to market research, doing lots of focus groups with teenage girls to find out what they really wanted out of a tampon.
The result was Satin Touch, which reversed that trend and basically answers the question "What would have happened if New Coke (to cite another brand article I've done a lot of work on) had worked as intended?" (the underlying issues are striking similar). Daniel Case ( talk) 01:51, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
Wow ... look at this much more detailed history of the company from fundinguniverse.com (Can we consider that site a reliable source? It suggests this is taken from an offline encyclopedia of company histories). Daniel Case ( talk) 03:26, 1 May 2013 (UTC) I'm also beginning to wonder if we should have a separate "criticism" section. Another controversy involving ... again, yes, the tampons that occurred to me, and is alluded to in above link, was the tendency of so many plastic applicators to get flushed despite instructions to the contrary ... and then wash up on beaches after the waste was dumped out at sea, most famously the Jersey Shore. The New Jersey and Massachusetts legislatures actually considered banning plastic applicators as a result of this. Here's an old but good Philadelphia Inquirer article on this. I have also found a picture on Flickr that is, yes, free, and could illustrate this. Daniel Case ( talk) 04:03, 1 May 2013 (UTC) And this is the patent at issue in the 2003 lawsuit. Since it's 1985, it's not the original one ... I'm trying to figure out which one is but it's hard since I can't seem to display the imaged pages. Daniel Case ( talk) 05:26, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
Also, that last sentence of the first graf of the Smilow section ... that wasn't meant to be editorializing, just a summary of what comes next. Daniel Case ( talk) 17:18, 3 May 2013 (UTC) Alright, at this point I think, for me to give it the GA, we should do something about that table at the end of the article and the awkward whitespace it creates. I think we'd be better served with a list format, as that would allow us to discuss specific product lines as well as discontinued ones. Daniel Case ( talk) 05:23, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Article (
|
visual edit |
history) ·
Article talk (
|
history) ·
Watch
OK, since this is the oldest one outstanding, I'll do it. I will be printing it out and going through it, so it might be a couple of days.
Reviewer: Daniel Case ( talk · contribs) 02:45, 12 April 2013 (UTC) OK, sorry for the delay. I will be doing what I hope will be a short copy edit and leaving my notes here afterwards. Daniel Case ( talk) 14:18, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
OK now ...
I didn't want to start this until after I'd made the biggest correction I saw needed to made. I found the bra company's version of the logo and swapped {{ infobox company}} for {{ infobox brand}}. After all, the article says right there at the get-go that this is a brand used by two separate companies for different product categories. The website says the same thing.
I think this can be a good article. It's obviously been fairly well-researched. By the standards of most of our corporation/brand articles it's pretty good. It touches on the basics.
But it has some issues to address before it's all the way there. And it could become a featured article with a lot more work and a lot more tapping the right sources.
Some specific issues:
Lastly, it might be worth mentioning that Playtex is the only feminine-care brand used for products outside that category.
Oh, and how widely is the brand used? US? North America? Worldwide? We'd like to know.
Oh, OK, here's The New York Times saying they should be "totally inoffensive". Seems like we meant 1987, not 1985.
For now, this leaves us without a picture of the bras, though. Either you can sneak into the lingerie department and get a photo of some hanging, or find a woman (or two) willing to pose with hers on (perhaps if you don't show her face).
And why did we lose the picture of the girl with the baby bottles? It's a free image; it's not the best picture I could think of to show that product line but it's better than nothing (remember the bottles and sippy cups themselves are useful articles and thus ineligible for copyright). Daniel Case ( talk) 04:34, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
I mean, you at least found something to give us a sentence about what aspect of Playtex bras its customers like (but more on this in a later section on ways to get this to featured status).
Daniel Case ( talk) 05:46, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
And speaking of Sport, could we have some discussion of these two lines? Slate has an interesting piece about Sport and its marketing (by a male writer, yet) that seems like we could use it. After all, we discuss the specific bras. Daniel Case ( talk) 04:34, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
And some more things:
Oh, here's another contradiction to resolve:
So are both Playtexes owned by Energizer Holdings, ultimately? Our own article on that company suggests that it only owns the consumer-products company. Can we clear this up?
I added a quote from the Times re the bra ads, and a note from that article about how they were nevertheless only run during daytime, to shore up the fair-use justification. Also, the Times has this article from 1976 behind its paywall about how things were before, and how Playtex and other bra makers used to have to put the bra on a mannequin, or show a diagram, to comply. Daniel Case ( talk) 17:20, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
It had also occurred to me when I was going over this that Playtex introduced the deodorant tampon (well, now they call it the "scented" tampon, and I think it's still unique to their line). We might be able to back up at least its uniqueness with Ebony ad from the late 1970s (which would also illustrate the intensity of their competitive status wrt Tampax; this is them going after Tampax like Pepsi after Coke (I love the fake box ... it's so obvious who they're going after without mentioning the competing brand). (Oh, and here's something (scroll down a page) explicitly saying that Playtex introduced the scented tampon).
Here's more on the TSS fallout from The Curse: a federal judge offered to reduce an $11 million verdict against Playtex if it took super-plus tampons off the market (And there's some ca. 1988 market-share info on p. 140 if you scroll back).
Oh cool ... the Watergate burglasrs wore Playtex surgical gloves.
From 1983: New York describes Playtex as the undisputed leader of the bra market, with a 25 percent share.
Daniel Case ( talk) 02:57, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
Playtex sues Tampax alleging patent infringement over the plastic applicator (which IIRC wasn't Tampax's first foray into that segment). Daniel Case ( talk) 03:12, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
A trademark infringement suit brought by Playtex against a competitor whose "background" section has some nice facts about the plastic applicator and how well Playtex had done with it and the "Gentle Glide" trademark by the mid-'90s. Daniel Case ( talk) 03:25, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the barnstar, but we're not quite done yet :-). I fixed the legal cites and I've found another source or two that can help us put the whole Tampax-Playtex rivalry into a narrative, which I think the history section could use. Basically, Playtex and the plastic applicator had not only managed to make it into Tampax's chief competitor, it had become so by capturing a the majority share of the teen market. Young women increasingly thought of Tampax as their grandmother's tampons, and all the things Tambrands did (brand extension, line extension ... things like introducing their own plastic applicator that didn't infringe Playtex's patent) just didn't work. Playtex continued to outsell them in the plastic-applicator segment and, if they couldn't reverse that they were fading away.
Until they got bought out by P&G in 1995. They really applied themselves (I'm sure with their new owner's expertise) to market research, doing lots of focus groups with teenage girls to find out what they really wanted out of a tampon.
The result was Satin Touch, which reversed that trend and basically answers the question "What would have happened if New Coke (to cite another brand article I've done a lot of work on) had worked as intended?" (the underlying issues are striking similar). Daniel Case ( talk) 01:51, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
Wow ... look at this much more detailed history of the company from fundinguniverse.com (Can we consider that site a reliable source? It suggests this is taken from an offline encyclopedia of company histories). Daniel Case ( talk) 03:26, 1 May 2013 (UTC) I'm also beginning to wonder if we should have a separate "criticism" section. Another controversy involving ... again, yes, the tampons that occurred to me, and is alluded to in above link, was the tendency of so many plastic applicators to get flushed despite instructions to the contrary ... and then wash up on beaches after the waste was dumped out at sea, most famously the Jersey Shore. The New Jersey and Massachusetts legislatures actually considered banning plastic applicators as a result of this. Here's an old but good Philadelphia Inquirer article on this. I have also found a picture on Flickr that is, yes, free, and could illustrate this. Daniel Case ( talk) 04:03, 1 May 2013 (UTC) And this is the patent at issue in the 2003 lawsuit. Since it's 1985, it's not the original one ... I'm trying to figure out which one is but it's hard since I can't seem to display the imaged pages. Daniel Case ( talk) 05:26, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
Also, that last sentence of the first graf of the Smilow section ... that wasn't meant to be editorializing, just a summary of what comes next. Daniel Case ( talk) 17:18, 3 May 2013 (UTC) Alright, at this point I think, for me to give it the GA, we should do something about that table at the end of the article and the awkward whitespace it creates. I think we'd be better served with a list format, as that would allow us to discuss specific product lines as well as discontinued ones. Daniel Case ( talk) 05:23, 5 May 2013 (UTC)