Mortein was the first fly spray on the Australian market.
In fact, a little known piece of trivia is that it was the very firdt television ad to go to air in Australia.
It didn’t really have any serious competitors until Baygon gone came along in the mid-70s.
Baygon, of course, was the product of Bayer chemicals, the German chemical giant, with enormous industrial muscle.
Baygon was a surface spray, a product line which Mortein didn’t have. In a characteristic blue and orange can, it used as its insecticides dichlorvos and propoxur, two potent organophosphorus insecticides that had not been on the Australian market up until that point.
Mortein of course used synthetic pyrethroids, an entirely different class of insecticides.
Interestingly, these two classes of insecticides kill insects in different ways. Although they both attacked the insect nervous systems, for the synthetic pyrethroids the insect went through a hyperactivity stage before it died – we’ve all seen this – you spray a fly and it goes berserk, bashing into windows and walls before it dies.
With the organophosphorus insecticides, however, this did not happen – the insects just dropped dead straight away – there was no hyperactivity stage.
The consumer perception of this was a cause of great debate in the insecticide industry. Some people believed that people understood that the hyperactivity stage with the pyrethroids was the death throes of the insect, whereas others believed that people did not understand this, and that people thought that the insecticide had not worked.
So Mortein had a problem – a chemical giant had released onto the Australian market a surface spray which would make cockroaches drop dead immediately. How was Mortein going to combat this threat?
I’ll tell you how they did it tomorrow. Stay tuned.