Targeting Women: Alienating Everyone
Mark Morford, a San Francisco Examiner columnist who may be a bit cynical and graphic at times - and whose politics are crystal clear (just a warning), just published a great piece, "Candles Make You Kill Yourself," that exemplifies the type of marketing to women that alienates men… and everybody else.
A telling excerpt from Morford’s piece:
And so you stare, dully, disconsolately, at the three white pillar candles on the table, each lit up and actually rather pretty and yet somehow deathly, miserably tedious, so boring you want to slice out your eyeballs with a cheese grater. After all, they are all white. They are all the same size. They just sit there. Oh my God (you ask yourself), what is wrong with the world of candles? What is wrong with me?
Enter the soothing TV voice-over. It shares your pain. It knows theh depths or your tormented soul. It says, with a bizarre sort of sympathetic narrator’s dejection, "White candles can be so plain." Wow, does that disembodied voice know you, or what?
Much to the dismay of Glade (the candle brand in question), Morford continues to rip the ad up one end and down the other. But, he’s not the only one who was turned off, I’m sure. The brand’s targeted market, women, probably laughed it right out of their buying minds.
This women’s market focused ad likely made most people cringe. But, the more immediate problem for the brand is that it irritated one man, with a large readership to dedicate an entire column to it. Glade should have done more research and worked to market transparently to women instead. Egads.
This ad is the first one I’ve covered that gets a D-.
