By Cliff Peale
The Cincinnati Enquirer

P&G brand manager Bob Gilbreath (right) and research and development manager Alan Goldstein wash a vehicle with a new Mr. Clean brand car wash (Steven M. Herppich photo) | ZOOM |

If you're tired of sloshing water out of a bucket to wash your car, drying it by hand and then seeing the spots reappear within hours, you have a new ally: Mr. Clean.

The 45-year-old icon - the oldest continuous character for any Procter & Gamble Co. product - is branching out from its traditional floor cleaner to cars. The new Mr. Clean AutoDry car-washer is available on the Internet now at www.autodry.com, and should be on store shelves early next spring.

It's got little to do with the floor cleaner that first featured the bald, cross-armed Mr. Clean in April 1958. But Americans washed their cars at homes 1 billion times and away from home 2 billion times last year, brand manager Bob Gilbreath said.

"We're definitely looking to take Mr. Clean in a lot of different places," he said.

To pump up the new Mr. Clean, P&G has tripled its marketing spending on the brand this year. And its research spending on the product is up tenfold compared with two years ago.

It's a microcosm of the larger P&G, which has compensated for low sales growth in categories like diapers with add-on products like baby wipes, and spread its reach from those low-growth categories into higher-margin areas such as hair colorants.

That helps P&G keep growing sales, which keeps Wall Street investors happy.

The company's success rate on new products has increased to about 85 percent, more than double the rate a few years ago, according to a new report from investment house Merrill Lynch. That was one factor analyst Carol Warner Wilke cited this week when raising her target price on P&G shares to $110 from $100.

AutoDry is a good example. With the market for traditional floor cleaners flat or declining slightly, P&G now can get into another section of supermarkets and drugstores - and an entirely new retail channel: auto-parts stores.

"We need to get growth," Gilbreath said. "Mr. Clean, just in all-purpose cleaning, is limiting."

P&G has been working on AutoDry for four years. The starter kit includes the sprayer, a filter and a soap bottle, with a suggested shelf price of $19.99. P&G said it was drawn to cars because there had been few improvements in the bucket-and-cloth method.

"It's the same thing since our grandfathers were doing it," said Alan Goldstein, R&D manager for Mr. Clean.

The main improvement is a polymer that creates a sheet on the car and eliminates the need to dry it by hand, Goldstein said. That comes from the filter, which a user can hear activating and which takes minerals out of the water, he said.

The AutoDry isn't the only new Mr. Clean product. In September, it introduced the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, a foam that can eliminate crayon marks on drywall and do other tough cleaning chores, P&G said.

E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com