Whistle-Blower: P&G Calls the Cops As It Strives to Expand Sales in Latin America --- Noted Marketer Tries to Sell Antitrust Notions in Bid To Catch Its Giant Rivals --- Sending In Legal Precedents
BUENOS AIRES -- Last year, television viewers here saw an extraordinary commercial. It had close-ups of rear ends and toilet seats. "Ariel, Ariel, Ariel," an announcer chanted.</br></br>Procter & Gamble Co. was mortified. For more than a year, it had been preparing to launch its Ariel laundry detergent in Argentina. Suddenly, an ad was telling all Buenos Aires that "`Ariel' is synonymous with toilet seats."</br></br>The spots were advertising an obscure toilet-seat maker, Ariel del Plata SA, which, P&G learned, has ties to its big rival, Unilever Group. Locked in a global brawl with the Anglo/Dutch conglomerate, P&G is convinced that the ad campaign was a calculated smear. But P&G's response was out-of-character: The mighty multinational complained to regulators.</br></br>In fact, P&G is becoming the biggest corporate whistle-blower south of the border. A latecomer to Latin America, the consumer-goods giant is scrawny in the region and is using a blossoming antitrust climate to help it catch up by filing lawsuits and snitching to antitrust cops. Although businesses around the world routinely seek to gain advantage over competitors by appealing to regulators, the scope and intensity of P&G's efforts to use Latin America's regulatory system to improve its competitive status are extraordinary.</br></br>The maker of Tide, Crest and Pampers employs more than two dozen lawyers in Latin America, with fully one-third of their time devoted to exposing practices it considers prejudicial. It has systematically collected regulatory rulings from mature markets in the U.S. and Europe and turned them over as suggested precedents to guide Latin American regulators trying to interpret newly enacted antitrust laws. It also has funneled reams of data to trustbusters to show how competitors' practices might harm consumers. It is "very, very insistent," says Manuel Sandoval, an official of Mexico's Federal Commission on Competition. "Even their chairman of the board came to visit us."