Brandwashed (17 page)

So husbands: Beware. Your wife, who you may
think
is buying that new Justin Bieber CD for your daughter, just may be concealing a shocking yet common secret that companies and marketers have known for years: gay, straight, young, or old, sex appeal comes in all shapes and sizes; and it’s a mighty powerful persuader, whether we can admit it to ourselves or not.

W
ahat it means to be a male consumer in America today is changing.

Historically, in our culture, women have been freer to play around with the boundaries of their gender than men; for example, for many years it’s been acceptable for women to wear jeans or slacks, spray on a musky scent, or sport a masculine-looking watch, whereas most men wouldn’t have been caught dead in a pink, flowery shirt or wearing perfume or makeup. But this is changing fast. In the United States, at least, more and more boys (and men) are giving themselves permission to
wear and adapt totems from the “feminine” world—whether it’s an earring, skinny jeans, cosmetics, or a fragrance (in Europe, more men wear fragrance than American females do). In fact, men today are more concerned about looking good than they’ve ever been—and more willing to shell out the dollars to do it. The global men’s grooming industry is already valued at roughly $27 billion worldwide, and fashion experts anticipate it will grow to $31 billion by 2014. And in 2009 the number of men who went so far as to undergo plastic surgery procedures increased by nine hundred thousand in the United States alone.
¹³

Companies and marketers are well aware of this shift, which is why they are going to new lengths to target the appearance- and beauty-conscious male. Take the recent rollout of “
Dove Men + Care,” the first male-only line from a brand that’s always catered to and been associated with females. “Now that you are comfortable with who you are, isn’t it time for comfortable skin?” one ad asks.
¹⁴

This migration of the male consumer into a traditional female arena is overturning the rules of marketing and advertising for all kinds of unexpected products. Take
body wash, for example. According to research data from Deutsche Bank and Information Resources, Inc., in 2009 body wash outsold bar
soap ($756.3 million versus $754.2 million) for the first time in the United States. And believe it or not, this is largely due to the fact that the marketers of this historically “feminine” product are more actively going after the male customer. So why are so many boys and men amenable to using body wash all of a sudden?

A few reasons. The first is that our worldwide preoccupation with
hygiene, which I talked about in an earlier chapter, is starting to take hold among more and more men. Fearmongering marketers have managed to convince many male consumers (females generally need less convincing) that bar soap is slimy, germy, even downright
dirty
. A second reason is that the makers of liquid hand soaps are beginning to hook new generations of men at an early age by strategically placing dispensers in elementary school boys’ restrooms, high school and college gym shower stalls, and coed college dormitories. As a result, by the time these men are out on their own and purchasing their own hygiene products, applying a liquid soap to their hands and body feels normal, even ordinary.

Some years ago, one maker of body wash noticed that men were resisting the product because they felt that the way it was applied—by touching one’s own body—was too feminine. So what did the company do? It invented a new type of loofah, providing men with a physical barrier of sorts between their hands and their bodies. It then distributed hundreds of thousands across the United States, and lo and behold, use of bar
soap went down and sales of body wash went up.

The third reason more men are using body wash is one even I can’t attribute to marketers: the rise in single motherhood. Today, many sons raised by single mothers have grown used to using
Mom’s
body wash—and as we learned in
chapter 1
, the products we grow accustomed to using as children tend to stick with us as adults. All of which, of course, is a boon for companies like
Unilever and Procter & Gamble, since selling body wash is far more lucrative than selling bar soap.

Seeking perspective on all this, I spoke with
Rose Cameron, the chief marketing officer of EuroRSCG Chicago and a widely acknowledged expert on the male consumer. Cameron points out that as the first “Axe generation,” as she calls it (the guys who were tweens in the early noughties), is coming of age, there’s no question that the wants and needs of the male consumer—and in turn, how he is being targeted by marketers—are changing. “They were the first male generation to have scented products that early,” she explains.

“So what’s next, Rose?” I asked. “Where are we going with all this?”

“The new trends I’m seeing are tattooing and the removal of body hair. Have you ever heard of ‘smoothies’?”

“Just the drink, Rose.”

“I’m talking about people. Men in particular.” Apparently, getting rid of all (and I mean all) of one’s body hair is a trend that started in the gay community and then caught on, albeit for a different reason, in the world of professional sports. “In some sports, body hair slows you down—at least that’s the rational justification,” Rose tells me. “It could also come from the pornography industry, since more and more men shave themselves down there, and pornography, as everyone knows, is a huge industry.”

It’s a rather extraordinary truth, I found out from a source who works for a large consumer product company: 15 percent of all U.S.
males shave their private parts (I kid you not), and it’s a growing trend. One that
Gillette was quick to capitalize on by posting a video on its Web site instructing men on how to shave their groin area. It was entitled “Trim-the-Bush-to-Make-the-Tree-Look-Taller.”

In the marketing world, it’s long been accepted that when a typical woman chooses a product, 80 percent of the reason is emotional and only 20 percent is rational.
Women will generally respond to an entreaty for a conditioner, a new brand of makeup, or even a laundry detergent from an emotional perspective, as in
My mother always used this brand
or
The family down the street drives this car
, before buttressing her emotional decision with a rational argument. This is why most advertising aimed at women tends to play to emotions, like nostalgia or fear or envy. For men, the conventional wisdom in marketing circles has always been that this ratio is reversed, that 20 percent of a man’s decision is emotional and 80 percent rational. But I don’t believe that for a second! Men and women are both emotional beings, the difference being that men need to disguise their emotional drivers under features and specs. Men’s decision making is 80/20, too—I simply call their internal process “emorational,” meaning that the practical features of a product permit men to disguise their own emotional natures. And manufacturers are well aware of this, too. Ever notice that marketers of products aimed at men tend to stress specs and numbers, like a 20-gigabyte hard drive or a 14.1-megapixel camera (yes, that
does
make a difference) or an Optimax 225 Sport XS engine, and so on? That’s because these numbers provide a rational, quantifiable justification for choosing that product over another (usually cheaper) model. According to
Time
magazine, “Product specifications disproportionately sway our decisions as shoppers, even when our own experiences tell us they don’t matter,”
¹⁵
and this is generally true more for men than for women.

Yet, the male consumer is changing and so are all the time-tested strategies for marketing to them. These days, if you look in the
cosmetics aisle at the products aimed at males, you’ll notice their macho names like “Ripped Fuel,” “Edge,” “Facial Fuel,” and “Axe,” which evoke associations of sporty, “manly” things like extreme sports, motorcycles, even war. This is because marketers know full well that these tough-guy names allow them to still feel tough and athletic even when buying a
product that’s in fact all about “beauty,” a traditional no-no for most straight males. Advertisers tread carefully around this issue. Even Mënaji, a spectacularly successful online male cosmetics company that offers a full line of natural products including a face mask, a concealer, and an under-eye treatment, gives its products aggressive names like “Camo” and “Eraser.”
Axe has even rolled out an all-black bottle constructed to look like a grenade, complete with indentations for a young man’s fingertips. The underlying emotional promise these brands are making is to smooth out the rough edges and make him look good while still being rugged and masculine at the same time.

This upsurge in male vanity is why men are increasingly falling prey to a cunning trick that retailers used to reserve for women. Ever been shopping for a pair of khakis or jeans, and when you finally find a pair that fits, you are delighted to discover that your size hasn’t changed since you were back in graduate school? I have some bad news for you. You’ve likely fallen victim to “
vanity sizing,” a devious ploy by which stores make clothes bigger so we
think
we can fit into a smaller size.
¹⁶
Many retailers have been doing this with women’s clothes for years, but the tactic is now starting to creep into the men’s sections of stores as well. When
Esquire
magazine sent reporter Abram Sauer into various stores with a tape measure, he found that pairs of men’s pants with so-called 36-inch waists actually ranged in size from 37 inches (at H&M) to 38.5 inches (at Calvin Klein) to 39 inches (at the Gap, Haggar, and Dockers) to a generous 41 inches at Old Navy.
¹⁷
It used to be that the typical man couldn’t care less what the size of his waistband was, but today experts know full well that
both
genders will be more likely to buy a product that makes them feel trim and svelte.

There’s no question that marketers are making a pretty penny by exploiting the fact that it’s becoming more and more socially acceptable for men to take an active role in maintaining their appearance. In 1995, 53 percent of men shopped for themselves. By 2009 that figure had risen to 75 percent. As Wendy Liebmann, the founder and CEO of WSL Strategic Retail, a marketing consulting firm, observes, the era of a man needing a woman’s opinion before he buys something may be on the way out. “Part of what we’re witnessing is a cultural shift,” Liebmann says. “Men are marrying later in life and they’re living on
their own longer.”
¹⁸
Which means that when men finally decide to walk down the aisle, they already know which brands they like, sometimes even bringing the brands they love into the marriage and influencing what their wives buy. Unlike the males of yesteryear, who went straight from under their mothers’ wings to under their wives’, today’s bachelors
have to
know how to do more when it comes to shopping, like how to get fitted for a suit, how to pick out sheets with the best thread count, and so on.

This goes a long way toward explaining why one smart store, the San Antonio–based supermarket
H-E-B, has created a “Men’s Zone,” a safe haven set apart from the rest of the store, where beauty-conscious men can shop for personal-care items to their hearts’ content while still feeling macho and masculine. Adorned with sci-fi blue floor lighting and flat-screen TVs, this stand-alone man cave offers 534 items that promise to do everything from soothe tired skin to tighten baggy eyelids to keep a guy smelling like fresh lemons all day, while five touch screens provide “grooming tips and product advice.”
¹⁹
And just in case it all starts to feel a little too girly, soccer, car racing, basketball, and other sports play continuously on the flat screens.
²⁰

Similarly,
Procter & Gamble is now ensuring that men’s and women’s
cosmetics will be shelved in different aisles in stores, so that the independent male shopper won’t feel uncomfortable or emasculated picking out a facial cream or under-eye smoother as the woman beside him chooses a shade of lipstick. How do these companies know that shelving the men’s products separately will increase sales? Thanks to the shadowy investigations they conduct in the dead of the night.

Very few people know this, but most major consumer-goods companies, including Unilever, Kraft, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola, among others, have set up “fake
supermarkets,” typically in abandoned warehouses in industrial parts of town. They stock the shelves with their own products as well as their competitors’, then late at night, under the cover of darkness, they invite people to come and, well,
shop.
While they’re browsing the aisles, cameras and in some extreme cases brain-scanning equipment are measuring what happens in real time as they select and reject various brands and items. Not unlike in the film
Minority Report
, these “supermarkets” generally have a control room lined with TV screens on
which reps can actually measure the changes in consumers’ brain waves as they encounter different positioning of products. Based on this data, the company develops what in the business is called a “planogram,” a model showing where each product should be placed on the shelves to generate the highest sales, then buys shelf space in supermarkets and drugstores accordingly.

As it turns out, the reason that shelving men’s “beauty” products separately is such a booster of sales is that even though gender roles may be changing, many men still don’t want fellow customers watching them lingering over the grooming shelves. But if they feel like they can browse freely without the scrutiny of other people’s stares, they’re more likely to go for the higher-end items or pick up an extra item.

So
can
brands traditionally aimed at women (with extremely feminine, ladylike names like “Dove”) make a successful crossover to guys? Well, when you consider that Marlboro began as a filtered cigarette marketed to women back in the 1920s, that Nair rolled out a chest and back hair exfoliant for men in 2002, and that Ugg was advertised as a men’s brand long before it became known as a must-have female boot, the odds are looking pretty good. And for an example of how even traditionally male brands are catering to men’s “feminine sides,” recently Dutch electronics giant Philips decided that men wanted “a more robust, heavy-duty tool to tackle hampers of laundry. Something with a larger grip and a more masculine look.” So it created the GC4490, which offers “more power, more steam, more performance.”