In the 1970s Pakuranga gained a national profile as the setting for a television commercial advertising Vim – a household cleaning agent. The commercial showed a team of smart, white-frocked women descending on the suburb to ask 300 ‘average’ Pakuranga women to test an unmarked powder cleanser. A reporter later asks a Mrs Simpson to rate the product. After giving a glowing testimonial, the brand of the cleanser is revealed to Mrs Simpson. ‘You’re joking’, she responds, seemingly surprised at the efficacy of the well-known product. Thereafter Pakuranga was popularly called ‘Vim valley’. As this clip from a 1980s documentary reveals, it was a name the community tried to live down.
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