The Sex Toy Paradox

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.