On Consumer Behavior and Communicative Scent
Women want to be desirable ?
During one of the lectures in the Consumer Behavior class in my grad school, we had a short discussion on what women really want? I will give you a short background on what brought forth this topic. We were dealing with a case of marketing communicative perfumes to both men and women. Communicative scents are basically scents that will attract the attention of the opposite sex. The product was called Sexette. The group presenting the case, positioned Sextte, as a ‘Groom yourself’ for men. While they suggested a slogan that read, ‘Feel special and make yourself special for him’, for the perfume targeted at women.
I was slightly skeptical (to put it mildly), here were a bunch of will-be marketers, who thought that a woman would like nothing less, but to be desirable to men. While men had other things on mind. Women were invariably one of them. I drew their attention to a popular tv commercial of Axe deodorant, that is currently giving fundas on seducing women. Call it my prejudiced thinking, but I feel women are always very interesting to men. Artists paint beautiful women, poets sing odes to them, and Shakespearean geniuses write on them! Now before I digress, let me throw few questions, to ponder upon.
Sexette, as the name suggests is about sexuality, how come a man would respond differently to it than a woman?
Would not the whole purpose of Sexette as a communicative scent be defeated it for men it meant becoming moisturiesed men, while for women it would do wonders?
How can we judge the natural instincts of men vs women?
Don’t men worry about being attractive to women? Not all men are gays!
2 comments:
Some points to ponder.
I think the idea is to modify the slogan in such a way that it tailors to the different ways men and women view and act on sexuality- and the difference does exist, which is rooted in the natural instincts of the male and the female. For example, in the majority of the cases, males usually approach the females than the otherwise. It is also proved that the brains of a woman and a man are significantly different.
The Axe commercial gives a similar funda on seducing women. It acually is in line with the proposed ad message for Sextette. It says if you use Axe, women will come to you, and you dont have to go to them. Sextette also says groom yourself, and they will come to you, SO THAT you dont have to go to them. I guess both the products are targeting the Metrosexuals :)
And yes, most men find women very interesting :) No doubt about that!
If all men studied the Game Theory properly, we'd all realize how wrong we are. Guys go to the gym and spend $$$ on perfumes to look and smell better than the next guy and attract the ladies. In the end, everybody looks good and smells good and nobody has a clear advantage over the other. If no guy in this entire world worked out; if none of us spent our hard-earned money on Axes & Sexettes, we all would look and smell like bokas, but women would still have to choose us because, well, there wouldn't be any other standard to compare us to. So we'd still have no clear advantage over each other but at least we wouldn't have to work our asses off in the gym nor spend our money on "communicative perfumes".
Wow.. maybe I should write about this in my blog. HEHE.
I think I digressed from the gist of the original post, but hey : )
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