The 8 Most Ridiculous Products Marketed For Men (The Village Voice)

From The Village Voice, this is a funny (although disturbing) collection of products marketed at men, as though we are dumb as rocks and would actually ENJOY a fart-scented candle (seriously, see below). Enjoy the banality.

The 8 Most Ridiculous Products Marketed For Men

By Nick Greene 

Wed., Apr. 3 2013

 

Did you know there was once a time when products were just products? Of course, now products are powerful things that decide your gender for you. Why else would companies spend so much of their time making "Men's" versions of even their most basic items? For the chance to sell twice as many of them by praying on the insecurities of men raised in a culture that trumpets superficially masculine constructs as shields against perceived weaknesses which are themselves the products of discriminatory gender-bias?

Oh, that's probably it.

To demonstrate this remarkably stupid aspect of our adorable society, we've found the 8 most ridiculous products marketed for men.


 

The Man Hanger

Why buy a $25 rebar clothes hanger? Because where else would you hang your "I'm a Secure, Confident Man" T-shirt?

The best part is, when you are done hanging clothes, you can straighten the hanger with your bare hands and pour concrete over it to construct a monument to your manhood. Make it really big so people know how manly you are--you did buy The Man Hanger, after all.


 

Dr. Pepper Ten

It's entirely possible that Dr. Pepper Ten's oft-mocked slogan, "It's Not for Women," was forced upon them by the FDA. Are we to assume that one sip of this sugary sludge will make women's ovaries explode from their abdomens like erumpent comets of sinew?

Let's just say we've never seen it explicitly rebutted by Dr. Pepper or the FDA.

Axe Shower Gel 

Axe has been the champion of pointless product gendering for years. Their deodorants and body washes have names like "Cool Metal," "Sports Blast," and "Anarchy."

The best part? They all smell like watermelon. Even "Anarchy."




Axe Shower Tool

As if manly soap wasn't enough, Axe sells a masculine loofah. What separates this from a normal loofah? Rubber casing that looks like a tire and the fact that it's called a "Shower Detailer Tool."

If you haven't figured it out yet, Axe thinks you're stupid.




Man Candles

Click on the above link, the one that says "man candles." Go ahead, we'll wait.

Fantastic, now Amazon thinks you're the kind of consumer who is interested in buying BBQ- and fart-scented candles. Enjoy their recommendations for "poop-shaped bath soap" and "Maybe You Touched Your Genitals Hand Sanitizer."

You know, "man" stuff.



HOME Cleaning Products for Men

You're a man and you have a dilemma: Your house is dirty. You could A) Let your filthy house fester until it becomes a breeding ground for maggots and roaches that will eventually chew the skin off your face as you sleep on a pile of garbage, or B) Go to the store and purchase cleaning supplies.

For years, option A was the only way to go for us Y-Chromosome warriors. That was until these cleaning products for men were made. Now we have faces, complete with beards and strong jaws.

Thanks, cleaning supplies.




Brogurt

This is the first sentence of the first paragraph of Powerful Yogurt's "Who We Are" section from their website:

From the time of the Greeks, abs have represented dedication, strength, power, and success.

Yes, abs -- that's what the Greeks are known for. Democracy too, but that's for pussies. Buy our Greek yogurt made with protein you're just going to shit out anyway.




Lip Balm for Men 

True story: I once saw a man use Chapstick. His son--a handsome boy--watched as his dad applied the balm. As he spread it on his lips, his son's face turned cold and gray.

"Dad?" he cried, "What are you doing?"

"There won't be any more catch in the backyard, son," the father said, his voice high and shrill, "I decided to use Chapstick and now I am no longer a strong male role model. Also, I sold the riding mower."

True story.

[@nickgreene]

Nicholas Jackson - Social Media and the End of Age, Race, and Gender

Jackson argues, following the lead of Johanna Blakley (based on her recent TED Talk) that social media is taking the "old-school demographics," as Blakley calls them -- race, gender, age -- out of the advertising/marketing equation and taking your interests into consideration.

And this is supposed to be a GOOD thing? Google's targeted ads freak me out sometimes - and my only consolation with Facebook is that their ads have no bloody idea who I am.

I guess it's the price we are paying for online access and (for now) freedom.

Part of the point in Blakley's TED Talk (which I have not been able to find yet, but you can view of PDF of it) is that women dominate the social media world online, so marketers are going to trend toward addressing their interests and needs, not those of men. Maybe THIS is the good news?

Social Media and the End of Age, Race, and Gender

Dec 14 2010

Nicholas Jackson - Nicholas Jackson is an associate editor at The Atlantic. A former media aggregator for Slate, his writing has also appeared in Encyclopaedia Britannica and Texas Monthly. Follow him on Twitter @nbj914.

During the 2007-2008 television season, Grey's Anatomy, the emotional hospital procedural on ABC in which characters have nicknames like McDreamy and McSteamy, charged advertisers $419,000 for a thirty-second commercial spot. CSI, that tired crime scene drama with spin-offs centered on cities from coast to coast, was only able to pull in $248,000. And it had about five million more viewers every week. Why? Because everybody who watches CSI is old. And old people don't buy anything.

Old people are worthless. At least they are to big media companies with similarly big advertising budgets. The 18-49 demographic is the one that is most important. These are the people with disposable income. Consider Glee, the runaway FOX hit in which actors (some closer to thirty than to twenty) portray high school characters that like to sing and dance in between classes -- and sometimes during, too. An annual survey from Advertising Age found that the show charges $272,694 for a commercial spot. NCIS: LA, which has the same number of viewers? $154,670.

Depending on which box you fit into, which show you watch, advertisers think they know something about you and your habits. They think they know which products you're going to go buy and when you're going to go buy them. They think they know just about everything.

They do know some things, it's true. They're not spending their money frivolously, throwing it at random shows and hoping it will stick. Current spending habits are based on decades of careful research, much of it led by Nielsen, the audience measurement system developed by Nielsen Media Research, a market analysis firm founded in the 1920s, long before there was a television in every home. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks, though, that model is in the process of being turned on its head. Social media is taking the "old-school demographics," as Johanna Blakley calls them -- race, gender, age -- out of the equation and taking your interests into consideration.

Blakley, the deputy director at the Norman Lear Center, a nonpartisan research and public policy center that studies the political, social, cultural and economic impact of entertainment on the world, gave a speech last week at the TEDWomen conference in Washington, D.C., entitled "Social Media and the End of Gender." Blakley's talk was greeted with less skepticism than it seems she was anticipating. And that's because those of us who use the social media tools she talked about know intuitively that things are changing even if nobody has spelled it out for us yet. But what are the consequences of that change?

"Social media will help us to move past the stereotypes we associate with gender," Blakley opened. "It allows us to escape our demographics." When companies monitor your clickstream -- where and when you click on a Web browser or while using another software application; believe me, they're doing it -- it's hard for them to predict your age, race or gender. "When you look online at the way people aggregate and organize, it's not around age," Blakley said. "It's around interests."

Give this a quick test. Visit your Facebook page. Click on your age. First you'll have to look around to find where it's been moved. With the new design that rolled out last week, it's harder to find this bit of information than ever before. Then you'll realize that you've been tricked: You can't click on it. But there's plenty on your profile that you can click on: your place of work; your favorite sports teams, movies, television shows; the people that inspire you. And when you do click on these things you'll be taken to a page where you can find the 23,920 other people on Facebook that list Dickey's Deliverance as one of their favorite books of all time.

I went to the first fan page that pops up when you search for NCIS: LA and, while Facebook, which is growing in every area, but is still dominated by younger users, can't yet provide the perfect sample, the first person associated with the page a young girl named Nikki. She likes NCIS: LA and anime. She likes Harry Potter books and James Van Allen, the American space scientist named Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1960.

Nikki has a diverse set of interests. Most of us do. And as advertisers learn that and develop new ways to measure it, it will mean a radical shift in how television shows -- and newspapers and websites and other products that rely for their revenue largely on advertising dollars -- are funded. How will these media change?

Women dominate social networking technologies, Blakley stated while showing a slide of how, across the board, more women use these services more than men. "Does this mean that women will dominate the media?" she asked. Are we going to start seeing television shows with all female characters and more movies that center around female protagonists? Will every showing at the local movie theater be a chick flick? No, Blakley insisted. Women will be the ones "who are responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre movies," she said. Because they're the ones that are using Twitter, where it's easy to view all messages by subject using hashtags and impossible to view only tweets from middle-aged white guys in Palm Springs. They're the ones, right now, that get it.

Image: Johanna Blakley speaks during Session 6: Crescendo, Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010, at TEDWomen, Washington, DC. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED.

Tags: Nicholas Jackson, Social Media, the End of Age, end of Race, end of Gender, culture, media, marketing, gender, The Atlantic, Johanna Blakley, old-school demographics, Google, Facebook, Norman Lear Center, TEDWomen, Social Media and the End of Gender

Advertising Age - Men Have Hearts, Too

Saw this little post from Advertising Age in my "men" feed - seems the pollsters are catching on to the idea that men are not wearing animal skins, with a club over one shoulder and dragging a woman back to the cave with his free arm.

Men are still widely seen as insensitive, uncaring, and not motivated by social and/or charitable causes. These stereotypes are partly earned and mostly annoying. A lof of men can't be bothered with other people's suffering - but women are a only a little better.

I support socially conscious businesses. I pay more for free-range chickens, for organic vegetables, for grass-fed beef, and for other healthy food sources. I donate money to save wolves from slaughter. I give away household goods and clothes to groups who give them to those in poverty.

Men do care. We do not have a social conscience - it would be nice if this were recognized, even by marketers.

Of course, the reason for marketing "cause programs" to male consumers is NOT to help the causes, which are probably all quite worthy, but to SELL MORE PRODUCT.

Lame intention, positive outcome?

Men Have Hearts, Too

Cause Marketing Misses the Mark with Male Consumers

Posted by Mike Swenson on 11.19.10

Mike Swenson

Listen up, brands. It's not just women you can reach through a cause branding program. Men have hearts, too.

From a brand perspective, cause marketing has always been viewed as a predominantly female marketing strategy. For the sixth annual Barkley/PRWeek Cause Survey, we interviewed male consumers to discover their views on cause. The surprising results showed that men are nearly as attracted to cause programs as women.

In fact, 88% of men say it's important for a brand to support a cause; 67% would try a brand because it supported a cause; and 55% would pay more for a brand that supported a cause. Yet, while 75% of CMOs say they now engage in a cause program, 68% say they have no plans to target men with their cause outreach.

This new research has revealed a huge opportunity for male-focused brands to connect with their consumers.

In today's economy you have to build a relationship with consumers that goes beyond selling products and services. The brands that win aren't focused on making consumers feel better about their brand, but are focused on how to help consumers feel good about themselves. And when a brand makes consumers feel better about themselves, the brand will be rewarded.

This newfound opportunity for brands targeting men comes at an interesting time. There has been a lot of social chatter of late about the future of cause branding. One can't help but take notice when the person who is considered the originator of cause marketing says it is dead as we know it. While I agree with Carol Cone, founder of Cone PR and now representing Edelman, I think it is more accurate to describe cause as evolving, not dying.

In June, Ad Age ran a column I wrote under the headline "The Day Cause Marketing Died." Carol and I are essentially saying the same thing. But as we all know, sometimes headlines misrepresent the true story.

Cause is not dying. But there are those who have come late to the party and believe they are doing cause when in fact they are not. For some in corporate leadership today, cause is a box they are simply checking off.

For those companies that are interested in doing more than that, cause is a wide-open arena of possibility to demonstrate to customers, employees and all key stakeholders that they actually do want to make a difference over the long term.

Cause is evolving. The comments from men in this most recent study are yet another example. Every single consumer cares about cause marketing. It's up to brands to find what they can do to make the world better. We all have a responsibility to make sure that cause does not die, but rather continues to evolve. When done right, it is the most powerful form of purposeful engagement a brand can have with its customers.

Tags: Advertising Age, Men Have Hearts Too, Men, charity, culture, marketing, stereotypes, cause programs, Advertising Age, Good Works, Male products, Men Have Hearts, Male Consumers, Mike Swenson