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Crest, Oral-B Marriage Gets Off To Rocky Start

By combining Crest toothpaste and Oral-toothbrushes, Procter & Gamble hopes to transform the fragmented oral-care shelves of drugstores so they look more like the hair-care or skin-products shelves, where consumers often buy a suite of products. But efforts to combine the world's No. 1 toothbrush and the world's No. 2 toothpaste have proved problematic.

A corporate structure featuring dual presidents was so unwieldy that the senior president finally stepped aside. A forced move for Oral-B employees from Boston to Crest's Cincinnati home led to an exit of talent. Then there were culture clashes: Oral-B favored meetings, while Crest liked memos; Oral-B made relatively quick decisions, Crest deliberated more. Meanwhile, the sales forces gunned for each other's jobs.

One merged P&G group had little problem integrating: the scientists. P&G's oral research and development team visited Oral-B's technological center in Germany, and then hosted the Germans in Cincinnati. Now, the two groups are trying to develop an Oral-B toothbrush and Crest toothpaste designed to work best together.

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