The advertising brief was simple - write a TV commercial launching new Foster Clark’s Instant Trifle, and show how easily a trifle could be made thanks to fast-setting custard and jelly.
My idea was, “it’s so easy that even dad and the kids can make it”. So I wrote a script where mum is out on Saturday morning and the family decide to give her a treat - make the dessert themselves. Quick cuts show ingredients prepared, end with look of delight on mum’s face when she arrives to a lovely trifle and beaming hubby and kids.
Nothing offensive or contentious? So I thought until the storyboard went in for consumer testing. It came out shredded.
Mums regarded the kitchen as their territory and did not want the family in there without them. The response was, “they’d only make a mess and I’d have to clean up after them” or “there’s no way my husband would do any cooking himself” - the script was spiked and we went back to pretty pictures of tempting desserts.
Now this all happened some 30 years ago. How the world has changed since the 80s. But just how different is it really?
One thing research can measure is the gender of grocery buying. We all know, visiting our supermarket, that there are more men pushing trolleys than in the past, The amount of food in the basket shows there is a family to feed.
To get figures, I asked Geoffrey Smith, Industry Director for Retail at Morgan Research in Sydney. They continually survey Australian trends, questioning 16,000 people a year.
“From 1997 to 2003, the number of male grocery buyers rose from 35% to 40%,” he explained. “But then it flatlined, stayed at 40% right up to 2011. And we don’t know why, really.” Obviously men have hit their supermarket ceiling.
The change has worked both ways. Women supermarket buyers fell five percent between 67 and 02, and have remained at sixty percent ever since.
Still, four out of ten men is a sizable number - not that you would notice it in TV advertising. In most commercials it’s still mum who pushes the trolley, cleans the toilet, cooks the dinner, as it has always been.
In most of the advertising world, the only time we see a man in a supermarket it is as a bewildered twerp.
Boyfriend is sent to the supermarket to buy one item - but then forgets the brand. However then he sees a girl bending down at the dairy counter, ogles the bareness at the top of her jeans, notices she has a black thong. Aha - Black Swan dips!
In a Keloggs Crunchy Nut commercial a young couple take a romantic balloon ride, but when they urgently need altitude, they jettison all their possessions. The final item is the pack of cereal. Cut to girl enjoying her breakfast, and boyfriend tossed far below.
There’s also a belief that men know nothing about periods. Recently a commercial for Libra showed boyfriend playing with a box of pads, sticking them on his arms and head, pretending to be a robot - till girlfriend and her parents walk through the door.
Now presumably such an expensive ad by a major company would have been solidly market researched before being made. Which leaves me scratching my head - what exactly do our Gen X and Y girls think about the men in their lives, and their own menstruation, that it can be such a joke? To understand I’d have to be much younger - and female.
However marketers had better start understanding that the nowadays the market is both male and female - almost equally.
ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com
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