Careers in intelligence can be a blessing and a curse. I have learned that my analytical brain tends to lock on to whatever is available in the moment – much like you can find yourself blandly reading the same billboard at a stoplight over and over again.

So I noticed at some point that bathroom soap has a story to tell. “Wash your hands – with soap!” As a parent of young kids, I find myself uttering these words maybe ten times a day. Children are dirty creatures. I spend a lot of time waiting on little hand-washers in restaurants and other public places – so much time, in fact, that it depresses me to think of it. For the diligent neat freak, there is an endless supply of soaps to be found out in the world. Collectively, this surfeit of surfactants can reveal some useful information about businesses that house the places in which you lather and rinse.


Soap is a commodity that businesses must procure in the regular course of their activities. A washroom without soap is like a day without sunshine. Most businesses have shifted to liquid or foam soaps – solid bars are as rare as washroom attendants anymore. The range of soap options in the market reflects the range of procurement options available to managers:

Color. Most of the pastel spectrum is represented in the market. Anecdotally, I would say that pink is the most common color you see, and thus is probably among the least expensive. Upscale businesses seem to gravitate toward blue or yellow. Kimberly-Clark offers its institutional customers a bilious green bulk liquid soap that seems to make your hands retain the scent of the paper towel. Is this a desirable feature?

Bulk versus bottle. Larger businesses seem to prefer bulk soap, which will come in a sealed plastic bag with a funky connector specific to the dispenser. Now and then, you see a company that opts to stay with individual bottles. The example that comes to mind is the Outback family of restaurants, which appears to use Yardley English Lavender pump bottles in all of its locations.

Marketing relationships. If you see a brand name on a soap dispenser, usually it’s the name of the supplier or the institutional manufacturer. The presence of a consumer brand, like Yardley at Outback, may imply a marketing relationship. Restaurants affiliated with Wendy’s feature Safeguard liquid soap, and each dispenser has the Safeguard logo prominently stamped on its face.

Centrality of organization. Centralized organizations buy the same soap for all locations; decentralized organizations buy based on local requirements and decision-making.
I offer my two alma maters as examples. Carnegie Mellon runs a centralized organization, with all units sharing a common facilities management service. Washroom soap is the same everywhere on campus. The University of Pennsylvania allows each of its colleges to operate autonomously, with a different soap in every building.
The exception to the rule is franchise businesses in the retail sector, which often seem to buy their soap as part of their overall procurement agreement with the umbrella organization. McDonald’s locations all seem to use the same soap, irrespective of ownership structure.

Outliers. Disney has long used powdered hand soap in its Florida theme parks, while using liquid hand soap in is resort hotels. The theme parks are models of efficiency. Is there some operational advantage that Disney gains by using powder in high-volume locations?

I will admit that revealing all of this collected knowledge in public is… unflattering. You can imagine backing away from me slowly at a cocktail party while I rave about the tactile umami of the liquid Safeguard at Wendy’s. I’m more fun than this. Honest.

Still, I was delighted to discover several years ago that I am not alone in my observational obsession. In fact, there exists a lively trade in the kind of close inspection of the everyday world that has cluttered my mind with trivia. The ringleader of this circus is Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe, author of a remarkable book called Outside Lies Magic.

Turns out you can learn a great deal about history, culture, and even business from simple observation. Stilgoe explains that he has been teaching a course on exploration at Harvard for the past 20 years. His students and former students see interesting data everywhere:

“One has just noticed escape hatches on the floors of inter-city buses and inquired about their relation to escape hatches in the roofs of new school buses. … Yet another reports that he can separate eastbound and westbound passengers at O’Hare Airport by the colors of their raincoats. … Noticing dates on cast-iron storm drain grates and fire hydrants introduces something of the shift of iron-founding from Worcester and Pittsburgh south to Chattanooga and Birmingham.”

Soap can tell us many things – about the cost structure of a business, about its target audience, about its marketing relationships, and even perhaps about its organizational structure. You wash your hands every day. What are you learning about your intelligence practice in the process?

I’ve come to believe that thinking differently about how to find useful data might be a valuable analytical exercise all its own. I am careful to shield dinner guests from my creepy knowledge of institutional hand soaps. I have even learned that my wife will no longer even feign interest in the commonality of tail light designs among late-1990s Dodge vehicles, signaling the rise of “parts-bin engineering” among automakers. (Look at the Durango and the Caravan – identical!)

But quietly, in my cluttered mind, I know I’m on to something useful.

Contributed by Michael Sperger, Competitive Intelligence at SAP