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There’s quite a simple answer to this – there isn’t a lot of it about. Yes, of course, there are any number of online sex surveys and we can even see MRI scans of women’s orgasms these days. But when we get into Hewson Group’s area of interest - which is how women consider the many things that they can buy that might enhance or improve their sexual lives we are into uncharted waters. The same applies to the other side of the coin – how do women’s sexual behaviours and the things they would like to do - influence what they might buy.

This is all pretty peculiar. For a start, it’s peculiar from a commercial perspective – Women’s Pleasure Goods are already a sector worth maybe $6-8 billion. We at Hewson Group agonise on a daily basis as to actually what the current value is and there is certainly very little industry information to go on. What we include and don’t include is a matter for some debate and there was a sort of doh! moment a few weeks ago when we realized that we had not included the battery market. With a minimum of 60 million sex toys in regular use it doesn’t take a lot of mathematical ability to see that the replacement battery value is upwards of a billion dollars a year.

Women Sex and Shopping has been in the press a lot recently and a lot of the reporting (whilst very welcome) has been somewhat inaccurate. Many articles suggested that the sex toy market would be worth $60 billion in about a decade. Of course, we never suggested any such thing although we speculated that the whole Pleasure Goods sector might be. The articles also tended to lack a little in nuance and missed out most of the caveats and conditions we set out for growth. If there is going to be a market as big as we think it should be then it won’t happen without the things that underpin other major sectors like Beauty or Lingerie. Brands, merchandising, advertising and customer analysis – all of these things are in short supply right now and that will need to change. In other words, Women’s Pleasure Goods is a really important sector but it has to mature into its potential and address important parts of the market such as the over 50s which it almost ignores right now.

The second and perhaps more peculiar aspect is the almost complete lack of research into the effects of the interaction between ‘goods’ and sex as far as women are concerned. The WSS work to date is fairly conclusive that there is a very clear causal enhancement from sex toys, lubricants and pornography. This enhancement is of course, clothed in complexity and many women will benefit from items in the Pleasure Goods pantheon without any affection for say sex toys or pornography. We need to expand our understanding of all aspects of the interconnection and that is a fundamental aim of Women Sex and Shopping. There is another important observation in that women may enjoy sex toys, porn and lubricants, to name just three items, but are these are probably not in the form that they would most like – premium sex toy ownership is very much in the minority at the moment and pornographic content may be effective but its presentation is still a trifle male aligned.

It’s also no good us talking about sexual goods and women as if there was a free market in such things. There is not. In many parts of the world it is illegal to buy many of the items we are discussing and very big issues regarding women’s sexual emancipation – or of liberty and human rights are going to emerge in the next decade. This is particularly so in the BRIC countries which we think are commercially very important but even in the UK and the USA there are still laws and attitudes which are an affront to the freedom of women to shop for what they want where they want.

Over the last week we have been going through all the research questionnaires that we have collected since WSS started.  We managed to acquire about 700 up until the end of 2010.  In fact we acquired so many that we found it difficult to analyse them properly given that each one has 4 pages of handwritten opinion. Not all of them are detailed but many of the later ones carry a lot of material – especially after WSS got a lot of press coverage.

Our initial interest was to establish whether or not there was a clear connection between what women can buy and enhancements to their sexual lives. That was obvious fairly quickly when we first started to gather up the first sets of answers  - but not always as we had expected. Pornography and fetish goods played a bigger part than we were expecting.  Now we are looking at the responses again to get a better understanding of the retail environment that women want and how all sorts of linked goods should be sold in the future.

Shuffling the hundreds of answer sets (each of which has a tag saying where it came from) we were struck by the diversity of sources.  About half come from sex shops or boutiques of various kinds and the main contributors there were Sh! in London, She Said in Brighton, Aphrodite Gifts in Bolton and Sinsins in Norwich. It seems more natural that we should have got such dedicated and lengthy responses from their customers but the ones we got from women we approached randomly in public seem amazing in retrospect.  Looking at the ‘encounter’ locations we could see pubs, universities, railway stations, Starbucks, exhibitions, parties – all sorts.  WSS might be quite famous now but it wasn’t at the start.  It’s amazing that we had the bottle, even more amazing that we weren’t locked up.

The Sex Toy Paradox

That’s not a very catchy title for a Post.  Perhaps Schrodinger’s Pussy is better.

Anyway, the next few blogs are about ironies, paradox, contradictions etc.  These abound in anything to do with sex related research.  The first irony is that, having spent a lifetime avoiding any form of contact with the Daily Mail we found ourselves subject to quite a big article in it a few weeks ago. Ironically, it was quite a good piece except for a rather egregious attempt to link the entire worldwide growth of sex toy sales to Cameron Diaz (the DM being celeb obsessed).  Then the BBC have popped up.  At the height of my involvement with the CRM industry I would speak to a major media organisation every day.  But never the BBC.  I dreamed of appearing on even a tiny regional programme but no, never happened.  And then, the other day, in a somewhat surprising turn of events a very nice lady from the Beeb phoned me up. ‘Would I,’ she asked, ‘know how many vibrators were sold in the UK each year?’  ‘Certainly,’ I said, and told her it was about 4 million.   ‘Is that enough? she asked.  This, of course, was one of those quasi-philosophical questions that can be hard to answer. ‘It’s more than enough for say, only one woman,’ I said carefully.  Caution was called for knowing that my answer could easily be quoted by Fiona Bruce on the Ten O Clock News.  ‘Hmmm’, said the BBC lady, possibly agreeing with me.

Naturally, she had a perfectly good reason for wanting to know if it was enough as she had read about the Trojan sponsored research in the USA.  This showed that just over half of American women had used a vibrator – which translated to the UK would mean over 11 million women. I explained about ownership, usage and buying being very different things. We think that the ownership figure is very high indeed and that maybe 65% of the under 70s in the UK actually ‘own’ a sex toy.  In some cases this vibrator might be many years old, its purchase history lost in the mists of time and it probably languishes un-loved in the back of a knicker drawer. But – it is owned and it has likely enough been used even if only a few times. Hence, there is a legitimate (50%+) answer to ‘do you own/have you used a vibrator? type questions.

Now we get to the paradox bit. About a third of women in the UK actually DO regularly a vibrator as their preferred method of masturbation (regular being once/twice a week or more).  That’s something like 7 million.  There may be a another 3-4 million who use a sex toy from time to time as an alternative.  We may be a million or two out but generally that’s the ball park (the UK is a slightly more developed market than the USA BTW).  So why are only 4 million sold per year?  It would seem to make no sense at all.  Here is a device that many women depend upon for their sexual pleasure and the renewal cycle looks like it’s 2-3 years long. It is hard to think of any comparable product (and of course, there isn’t anything that can be described as comparable – sex toys give orgasms for goodness sake) that would not be renewed/replaced regularly and – more to the point – owned in multiples.  Shoes are, handbags are, lingerie and fragrances are.  The answer lies in the retail infrastructure.  With a few exceptions, the shops are wrong, the merchandising poor, brands are scarce and marketing scarcer.  70% of women in the WSS survey said that they found just the idea of buying a sex toy to be ‘exciting’ which suggests a very supressed latent demand. The true market for toys in the UK must be 3-4 times what it is now (and that is a proxy for most Western markets). This is not a mature market, merely an adolescent one.

On most days, Hewson Group puts out a lot of content on our Facebook page ‘Hewson Womenshop’  with lots of links and comment.  Over the next few days we will transfer a  lot of this content to this blog – hopefully!

M&S prepares to relaunch online platform | News | Marketing Week
www.marketingweek.co.uk

Yes. Well, Hewson Group has been saying until its blue in the face that most companies have a very poor or non existent relationship between High St and online. This is M&S recognizing the importance. All day and every day people walk through Shops, buy items or not and leave. Who TF were they might be a good question for most retailers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/8439976/Think-Tank-Smart-businesses-reap-the-rewards-only-imagination-can-achieve

Great article by Laurence Green of 101. This should be compulsory reading - especially at the moment. it's about why we reject ideas that might transform our businesses. There is much inertia in retailing to women. New ideas are risky but not as risky as perpetuating obsolete marketing strategies.

Hewson Womenshop has now got over 1,000 friends on facebook and is collecting new ones at the rate of about 20 a day.  We try to post 2-3 links every day and the 'following' is very substantial. 

We are still unconvinced by much social media as a business tool but for us as analysts Facebook is an unusual asset.  It allows us to see markets in a way that would be difficult to monitor otherwise. We have tried to get transparency of much of the existing adult' market and on future players such as lingerie retailers.  Our Facebook membership is very lopsided geographically.  A great many from the USA obviously but maybe a third of the total from Brazil. Very low numbers from Europe outside the UK.  France, Italy and Germany are big voids.

The great thing is that we have established a big information network in a matter of months.  Some Chinese Friends would be helpful......

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It was announced last week that Love Honey has acquired Coco de Mer.   At first glance this might seem an odd match.  Successful online retailer (and sex toy specialist) buys loss making upmarket High St operation.

Not so, we think.  Coco de Mer is a great brand to have; it might be very flawed commercially but we liked what it was doing and the products it was carrying.  It was always a puzzle as to why the two, West London, stores did so badly. £1.2m in revenue to Feb 2010 and a near half million loss in 2008-9.   Maybe it was too exclusive, too expensive and perhaps the stores were more geared to looking not buying.  Love Honey have a revenue of £13.4 million and a 30% annual growth rate.  They bring a lot of internet expertise and an ability to take Coco to a wider market than Kensington. That was pretty much Richard Longhurst’s view when we spoke to him “ Lovehoney has 10 years of online trading and we've developed a platform, technology and best-practise in-house that we will immediately deploy for Coco De Mer. There's an enormous amount of upside online in the short term.”

Love Honey say that they will keep the two brands separate (which is logical) but there are clearly synergies and overlaps in terms of supply which we think is going to start favouring a wider selection of high quality companies than that offered by traditional ‘adult’ distributors – who are, in any case, facing an uncertain future.  Most of all, Coco de Mer offers unlimited scope in the close to mainstream market which Richard seems to have in mind too:  “Long term the strength of the brand that Sam Roddick has built over the past 10 years has amazing potential for shops and products. It's far too early to say what will happen, but we will continue the amazing work that Sam has done and take Coco de Mer to a global audience.”

Coco might have been a bit of a loss maker but the hard work’s been done making it an aspirational brand.  You could pick up a Coco store and put it in any High Street you like from Richmond to Rome.  It’s part of a £15m company now and with a bit of imagination and a lot more lingerie it could be a mass market Agent Provocateur.

Kiki de Montparnasse

This blog piece is a sort of ‘imagination aid’ for anyone who is kind enough to be participating in the Future of Retail research.  The questions in the research are:

1. The Future of Women’s Retail (for Pleasure Goods)

What we would like to know here is what sort of store would you really like to shop in (although you might of course, prefer online).   In the past, women  who have participated in WSS research have mostly set out ideas for shops that only rarely exist in practice - with exciting, immersive environments and a range of products that are ‘emotionally’ linked to each other.  Is this what you think?  If you look at the Top 50 goods on our site do they ‘fit’ together? Should department stores reflect this in their layout and product choices?  If you were shopping for something explicitly sexy what would give you an exciting retail experience?  If you are lucky enough to have found a shop you really like could you say what it is and why?

2.  Who should make Pleasure Goods?

Hewson Group think that there is a significant dysfunction in the market right now.  Something like 60-70 million women in Europe and North America own a sex toy but no significant brand makes one.  Personal lubricant is a really important issue for women across age ranges and is arguably a key sexual enhancer for older women and yet no ‘lovely’ brand such as Chanel or Dior markets such a product.  Luxury fetish (although you don’t have to have a fetish to like the idea!) such as whips, masks, handcuffs are not made by luxury manufacturers although we can see companies like Louis Vuitton playing with the possibilties.  High heels and other luxury shoes such as Louboutin and Jimmy Choo are perhaps the exceptions that demonstrate the possibility.  What do you think of this?  Who would you like to see in the market and would it make a difference to how and where you shopped?  Can you give examples of brand names and the goods they might make?

 ******************************

In the responses to the original WSS research (2008-10) the majority of women said that they didn’t find buying lingerie ‘very exciting’, although to be honest we didn’t actually ask the question in any great depth. The issue of what sort of environment women consumers wanted to shop in was much more extensively covered and we gave some ‘illustrations’ to help prompt ideas. Around 70% of women consistently picked the Aladdin’s Cave concept of a shop with many goods and a freedom to look and feel.  It has been pointed out to us many times since that in choosing the ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ metaphor we were also suggesting an emotional space with exotic overtones and the challenge of entry and exploration.

We don’t want to be prescriptive. There are many viable possibilities and what may be a good idea in one country may not fit in another country or culture. Arguably, the lack of adventure in much of retail opens the door for some pretty radical thinking.  The extracts below (taken from recent emails to us) are just food for thought.  You might also like to look at the Blog piece on Department Stores.

 Agent Provocateur

 A few extracts.........

“It is difficult to describe my perfect shopping environment. It would need to feel classy but not intimidating and full of lovely things.  The shop would sell not just sex toys etc but lingerie (in larger sizes!!!) and perhaps skincare and bath products too.  Erotic books and art are all things that I would buy once I was in the mood. Goods would be displayed in a way that they could be picked up and touched, they are tactile after all, with staff that would be knowledgeable.  I cannot describe just one perfect environment. For me, Coco de Mer was nearly there but perhaps just a little odd and dark but always an enjoyable shopping experience. I would love to find a shop like a welcoming art gallery full of wonderful things that I would want to own or dream of owning one day.”

Aged 51, Twickenham UK

“I prefer an experience in a store that does not make an assumption about my relationship with pleasure products, or sex in general. The only place I’ve experienced this is at the Passage du Desir store in the Marais, Paris and it was memorable for that very reason. There was a certain amount of sweetness and kitsch, which changed the store from just another ‘shop that sells sex toys’ to a shop that evokes love, affection and playfulness.

I’ve been into a couple of stores which are geared towards a female audience and have a distinctly femme fatale décor – dark colours, burlesque or bordello style interiors (lots of red, black and deep purple) and overzealous sales assistants – almost the extreme opposite of the usual tacky, explicit male-oriented stores, but still a very strong statement and strong negative symbolism. Two girlfriends refused to come in to the store with me – the décor reminded them of ‘prostitutes and brothels’ and this instant association turned them off shopping in the store. Understandable. When buying a sex toy, we don’t necessarily want to feel like a prostitute ;-)

I think somewhere in the middle is perfect: luxurious, feminine atmosphere much like the cosmetic floor of a luxury department store, with helpful consultants who are available when I have questions but aren’t overbearing – for me, this is an immersive environment that never fails to engage me. It addresses all senses – there are luxury fragrances being sprayed, imagery depicting beauty, beautiful packaging everywhere and sample products to test. There’s nothing shocking, confronting, explicit or taboo to sour the experience.

I would be more likely to repeatedly shop where I have the freedom to browse and experience a store that’s infused with playfulness….”

Aged 32, Sydney, Australia

passage du desir, Paris

“I enjoy shopping for lingerie and I have a lot of it. I like going into Victoria's Secret but on reflection I guess I like it without being engaged by it (or immersed to use your expression) and in the USA VS seems a bit 'clean'. I felt more excited by going into Agent Provocateur in London when I was last there but when I think about it maybe I was being flirted with rather than fully seduced if you see what I mean. Maybe if the store had been bigger or deeper or something  It was a superficial contact between me and them (but I did buy something so maybe it wasn't so superficial!).

I do have a couple of sex toys but I bought them both off the internet.  That's a not a good thing because I would have preferred to buy them in a shop but maybe I wasn't brave enough. I definitely would have been brave enough if there was a sex shop I liked and I know that there are supposed to be some nice shops in NY but not where I work.  So what would I wish for?

Yes I do want to step into another world. That seems to be important because there is fantasy involved and I want to feel both escapism and anticipation. I can't think of any shop that really does that for lingerie and most sex toy shops are just tacky.  I'd want to be drawn in to an atmosphere that made my imagination run riot!  maybe some art, nice fragrances and some music, mystery rooms, dirty books to browse. And brands, although I don't know if that's the marketer in me talking. If there were well known brands there then that would make a massive difference to my good girl/bad girl brain. I mean, picking up on what you suggest, if there was a blindfold by Dior or something then I'd want it and if I bought that I'd probably buy the most expensive sex toy in the place!   But Dior don't make things like that (at least I think they don't...) and if they did they would probably need to sell them in different shops to those I see now. Is that right? If it is then it's a sort of catch 22.  But that would seem to be your problem to solve:))”

Aged 32  New York

                  “A glass front shop, and it to be all open plan, light, clean and crisp, like an Apple store. The clientle would be readers of Vogue / Marie Claire etc. The experience would be very high end, exclusive and very contemporary. With glass or contemporary styled furniture, different coloured lighting -with the different product type having it's own coloured lighting area, glass shelves, big fish tanks, animal skin covered chairs & settees. 

Only women or gay men working in the shop. They welcome you on entrance and ask if you need any help in particular, but then don't bug you if your there to just browse. I would want to feel welcome, and relaxed, and not afraid to pick anything up.  The store assistants would encourage you to pick everything up, feel it, smell it, test it. 

There would be big TV screens on the wall showing testimonials and celebrity endorsements and product advertising, special offers etc. There would be small interactive screens dotted around, where you can find product videos on how to use them, and a search facility if your not sure what to look for.

A small coffee shop  / juice bar  / cocktail bar area where women can sit down and chat, and take it all in.

A large selection of goods - basically a one stop shop / department store for luxury / erotic goods.”  Aged 34, Manchester

CRM in High St Retail: Does it Exist?

A rather existentialist question.  Short answer:  Not really.  Also, for the avoidance of doubt, we refer to higher value retail (and obviously women’s goods) and not supermarket or similar FMCG.

This is a bit of a Once Upon A Time story and in its epic sweep will include a brief history of CRM, of the internet, of the dot com boom and finally Social Media.  It is  a Cautionary Tale….

In the late 1980s this analyst (Nick Hewson) joined a small software house just outside London.  They were starting to develop a very early version of a relationship management application.  Indeed, a bearded Kiwi genius called Grant McAlpine was laying down many of the concepts that you see in today’s CRM software – a fact that history does not adequately record. The software worked fine but there were some snags.  There was no internet, no portable computers and no mobile phones.  There wasn’t a lot of computer networking either.   All this tended to doom to failure all attempts to use it commercially (and most software vendors!) although as learning exercise such projects were probably invaluable.

Across the Atlantic, the idiotically named Sales Force Automation (SFA) was being developed and deployed. Whatever it did, it certainly didn’t automate salesforces.  The Americans had some significant commercial issues that they wanted to address and chief amongst these (particularly amongst pharmaceuticals and financial services) were huge sales forces and huge geographies.  Most companies had no clue as to what their salespeople were doing from one week to the next although playing golf was always a good guess.  SFA was important but essentially tactical.  It had little to do with the customer (although clearly it should have done) as most companies were obsessed with internal control not external view.  SFA didn’t work for lots of reasons but the technical infrastructure was a fairly obvious failpoint – you have to imagine the pre-internet world.  Nevertheless, in the early 1990s the big management consultancies were scouting around for new ways to charge clients vast amounts (ERP had proved very nice thank you).  SFA and Customer Service stuff looked nailed on for this with fabulous amounts of expensive data structure plumbing needed to make it ‘work’.  All they needed were some Trojan Horses.  Cue the instant rise of companies like Siebel, Clarify and Vantive and the invention of an umbrella term – CRM -  for what they did.  I can’t remember where the acronym came from; it wasn’t us but it might have been Peppers and Rogers.  To put the dizzy rise that followed into perspective, it is necessary to know that Siebel were only established in 1993 and by 2000 they had a market cap of $24bn (Twenty Four Billion USD). 

Meanwhile….  In 1989 I set up Hewson Group as an analyst company. I did this with the (now ex) Mrs H who had recently left a very elevated perch at Merrill Lynch (where they had been busy inventing some complex financial instruments and we know what eventually happened there….).  We did some work on looking at the impact on SFA systems and concluded that it was marginal.  We thought that the big potential winner from increasing computerisation and (recorded) customer contact was marketing.  By 1993 we had gravitated to Cranfield School of Management and found two outstanding marketing academics (Professors Malcolm McDonald and Hugh Wilson).  With them, we published a report called ‘Emerging Information Technologies – a Marketing Opportunity’.  This was essentially a collection of edited essays from many sources – including two from the still relatively small Microsoft and a couple that foreshadowed the rise of the Internet.  It made our reputation, It bought us many clients in Financial Services, but when CRM went nuclear two years later, marketing was not to be seen as a player or a beneficiary – indeed it was many years in the future that Siebel, for example, actually had an analytics capability.  In that sense, we were wrong in assessing the prime beneficiaries.  Marketing was an observer at a party it should have been in charge of.

CRM, in the years 1995-2001 was the ultimate panacea product.  There was an inescapable thought amongst analysts that companies who had bought CRM had bought the idea itself.  That mere ownership of an application was equivalent to proper execution and that alignment with any sort of overarching business strategy was unnecessary.  The ‘C’ for Customer in CRM was usually irrelevant and nearly every project was internally focussed, few actually considered the customer experience.

And let us not forget the wilful suspension of disbelief about the Internet and online trading which informed the same timeframe.   Vast sums were invested (and spent) on specious notions that business models, business rules and consumer behaviour would all change beyond recognition overnight.  Well, as we well know, they didn’t.  When Hewson Group carried out in 2001 the (then) famous research into e-commerce called ‘Profit or Pain’ we found that the ability to execute online across all sectors and most companies across Europe was close to non-existent.  I read through some of the research the other day and it’s scary.

So, fast forward to 2011. I read today, an article by Redeye that quotes some research from Omniture to the effect that for every $100 that is spent on driving traffic to websites only $1 is spent in converting that traffic into business. C’est la meme chose.  Perhaps we should add that as a 10 years later postscript to Profit or Pain.

The retail ball, so to speak, is in the air, but eyes slide away to look at shinier baubles.  They look at Social Media because this is a lovely panacea with lots of interesting flashing lights. They look longingly at the Internet which is a bauble with real and important attractions but contains explosives called brand distance and commodisation, which will go off if not handled carefully. And the main ball - the High St store - what serious attention does that get?  Not much.  CRM in Retail?  Not much. Show us the stores that understand the customer and that can capture the customer.  Show us the ones that are immersive and exciting and different.  Show us the ones that don’t have a 1950’s mentality and technology.  Or have Apple stolen the ball and hidden it?

The UK press over the last few days has devoted much coverage to the (Prime Minister  David Cameron’s sponsored) Mary Portas report on the future of the High St.   Apologies to our international readers if this seems a somewhat parochial concern but actually it’s not.  The issues involved apply in many countries.

It’s nice to see Mary echoing – in a BBC interview - our observations in last weeks blog that shops are stuck in a 1950’s model (Portas actually says the 1960s).   She doesn’t go on to say why this is however or the causal effects of such outdated thinking.  In fact, her report is long on some (obviously important) infrastructural issues such as planning and out of town shopping areas but light on some very important areas such as technology – and most importantly for us – the quality of the shopping experience.   It might be though a bit odd that the ‘Queen of Shops’ should not explore in more detail the fact that some of the problem lies with the fact that shops are simply not good enough. 

It’s easier, in a way, for us make observations about the High St because our concern is only with a specific sector – Women’s Pleasure Goods.  However, our definition of Pleasure Goods is pretty wide and encompasses Lingerie, Beauty, Sex and Luxury which are pretty compelling reasons for the key consumer, the female one, to be on the High St.  We were saying, over a year ago, that less than 100 outlets across the world had got it (nearly) right about what women want when shopping for Pleasure Goods. The gulf between the stores that women described in the WSS research and the available reality is very wide and an indictment of the sclerotic thinking in retail.  By the same token, we would say that there was also a considerable gulf between advertising imagery and promise in many products (the ad agencies get it) and the environment they are usually purchased in (the stores don’t get it).

Exciting, ‘must visit’ stores for women could be an important ‘Anchor’ in the High St and without them a little bit of magic and attraction will be absent.

The news last week was that La Senza (The UK operation) has called in KPMG for ‘restructuring’.  There are some who may see this development as a Bellwether for women’s retail.  They would be wrong.

Hewson Group quite like La Senza.  The brand name is good and in the shops it’s quite nice really.   But that’s the problem.   La Senza has little going for it other than being …quite nice.   The shops are wholly undifferentiated in design and atmosphere.  The merchandise might as easily be acquired on the internet and there is no recognition of the deeper product range that might be suggested by Women Sex and Shopping.  The staff are also quite nice but highly qualified service is not really in evidence. In all our research to date only a handful of women have ever mentioned La Senza as a shop that matched their ideal shopping environment.

Quite nice is not good enough.  Not for La Senza or for anyone else who wants to compete n Pleasure Goods.

Ernest Dichter and Emotional Shopping

What, you might ask, has putting a tiger in your tank got to do with Women Sex and Shopping?  To which there two answers:  Quite a lot and Ernest Dichter.

Dichter was a Viennese (where else) psychologist who started to peddle his theories in the 1930s and by the 1960s was hugely influential on companies like Proctor & Gamble, DuPont and Exxon (hence the ‘Tiger in the Tank’ campaign).  We first came across Dichter when we started to research women’s motivations when shopping and this particularly good essay in The Economist reminded us just how important he was and why the things he perceived have an acute relevance today.

http://www.economist.com/node/21541706

 “You would be amazed to find how often we mislead ourselves, regardless of how smart we think we are, when we attempt to explain why we are behaving the way we do,” Dichter observed in 1960, in his book “The Strategy of Desire”. He held that marketplace decisions are driven by emotions and subconscious whims and fears, and often have little to do with the product itself. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Dichter saw human motivation as an “iceberg”, with two-thirds hidden from view, even to the decision-maker. “What people actually spend their money on in most instances are psychological differences, illusory brand images,” ….

And as the Economist goes on to explain, Dichter became a discarded guru by the 1970’s but his ideas about the role of the unconscious are coming back into fashion.  We would entirely agree - and the whole notion of the breadth and inter-connectivity of Pleasure Goods is supported by Dichter’s work.  Our research work with smaller boutiques who have immersive environments, get product mixes right and play on subliminal erotic drivers proves beyond doubt that, in every case, their customers display different, frequent and far more profitable buying behaviours. 

The Mysterious Case of the Offensive Sex Toys

Yesterday (Sunday 8^th Jan) the headline (yes, it was the headline because the world is so boring at the moment news-wise) in the Mail on Sunday was “Sex toys for sale at Boots, prominently displayed close to healthcare products in full view of children”.  For international readers of this blog it should be noted that the Mail is in fact the 2^nd most visited newspaper site in the world.  It should also be noted that despite Hewson Group’s regular appearances in the Mail it is not exactly our organ of choice, so to speak.

Anyway, the thing is that the Daily Mail has ‘discovered’ that Boots are selling sex toys and civilization is in danger. In particular, a state of affairs has occurred whereby “Customers have to walk past the sex aids in order to shop for shampoo, deodorants, toothpaste and sandwiches.”  Can you imagine the horror?  I bet that all the lady customers are so traumatized that, as a result, they all involuntarily buy very long tuna baguettes whilst dragging away screaming children who want to stay in the toy department.  Just in case you would like to be scandalized too, then the Mail has helpfully reproduced the offending displays and you can see them here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083701/Sex-toys-sale-Boots-displayed-near-healthcare-products-view-children.html

It may be as well to mention that the Mail has form here.  Only the previous week it was mightily animated by the Sherlock Holmes  TV drama ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ which showed some nudity before the 9pm ‘watershed’.  The Mail was unmoved by the fact that: a) this was some of the finest television produced anywhere in the history of broadcasting and b) the nudity was of the half buttock type that can be seen on Skegness beach on a wet Wednesday.  Anyway, you can make up your own mind because you can visit the Mail’s website and see all the offending images. It goes without saying that you should only do this after 9pm.

And our point is?  Well two points actually.  Firstly, the overwhelming majority (it looks 90% plus) of the 500 or so comments on the article support Boots (and these are DM readers) so the ‘backlash’ predicted by the paper looks a bit unlikely.  Secondly, WSS has consistently argued that chemists/drugstores are not the natural places to sell sex toys.  Now, that is not to say that we don’t support Boots 100% (and indeed all the other drugstores that do so).  We think it’s great that they do and we also recognise that in some parts of the world – the USA being an obvious example – the local drugstore maybe the only show in town.  Nevertheless, we can only see the current state of affairs being a substitute market unless drugstores raise their imaginative game.  It’s not where women in WSS research want to shop for erotic goods.  The emotional environment is not right and it’s too close to implications of ‘dysfunction’.  We believe it’s actually do-able for Boots but a re-think of how the area might be designed and merchandised is definitely needed.

The WSS 2012 Survey Questionnaire is now being used.  It's still a little provisional because we have amended it a great deal and we are just market testing it.

In the current version it is very much designed for handwritten answers (hence there is no online version yet).  We prefer this because it allows women to express a lot of very personal opinions without being confined to a yes/no binary response.  Over the last two years it has proved a very successful format. Also, if we are bigging ourselves up, it's somewhat unique.  What we have tried to do is to see a 'whole woman' view and for this we need to understand both sexual behaviours and retail behaviours and expectations.  This ain't easy.

You can see the questions here

WSSglobalsurveyjan2012.pdf

You would be very welcome to email answers to any of the questions to wss@hewson.co.uk

One specific question that is not in the survey is about sex toys - although there are many others on that subject.

Not a lot is known about sex toys which might seem a curious statement because there is a sort of 'duh' answer.  Consider this though.  There are over 100 million women who own one and maybe 50-70 million who are regular users.  That's a lot because ownership is mainly found in N Europe, North America and a few other places.  We think that the eventual market is 400 million units per year. If sex toys were part of another consumer market it would be seen as a 'must do' category to be in for many big companies around the world.  Yet, absolutely NO significant luxury brand is involved in a market where, for many reasons direct and indirect, they should be.

So, how do women see sex toys?  For about 30% they are really important functionally in terms of orgasm. For other women they are part of a repetoire.  But in our surveys, well over 70% of women said they found the IDEA of buying a sex toy exciting in itself.  That's fascinating because most toys on sale are not necessarily aspirational and very often the same women deplored the actual shopping experience. In other words, the odds are a bit stacked against women finding the idea exciting but they do.

So some questions arise.

When women think about acquiring a sex toy are they:

1. Emotionally in the same mindset as they might be when contemplating a new lover (ie. the toy is a lover)

2. Sublimally, anticipating orgasm

There is a third possibility which is that a Toy is exciting as a possession. A woman might find the idea of owning a Lelo exciting - in itself, as an objet d'art.  What would happen if say Gucci, Armani or Louis Vuitton made toys?  Does this change the game all the way through the price ranges?  In car terms, everyone wants to own a Ferrari, most people have Fiats.