True Beauty, The Real Experience?

I found our true beauty day to be a great way to learn and understand what consumer experience really means. The experience that we gain from a product is not necessarily how it was displayed or what immediate benefits it gives us, but the deeper benefits (such as inner beauty and self-confidence) that a simple product such as deodorant could instill within us. It reminds me a bit of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which we’ve obtained the basic needs and now are at the higher stages of self-esteem and self-actualization.

For Dove products, the marketing scheme is aimed at young to middle-aged women who probably want to be assured that they are beautiful, and will rally behind a brand who knows that true beauty doesn’t mean being a 6-foot skinny blonde model. I believe many of the marketing decisions have to do with what customer experience this segment needs.

With Axe products and the high school male population whom they segment to, the customer experience that Axe is trying to achieve is love, sex, acceptance, and hot factor confidence. The experience of being the hot guy that all the girls chase is the experience. Perhaps it does conflict with the Dove true beauty campaign, but we ignore the fact that these campaigns were made on 2 separate segments that need to hear 2 opposing ideas. This isn’t Unilever’s fault. From a marketing perspective, I think they both have done a good job. As a woman, I still side with Dove and think Axe has racy commercials. I also would never need to buy Axe.

This past summer, I really admired Pepsi’s Mountain Dew marketing campaign. I thought it was one of the smartest ones yet. Mountain Dew came out with 3 new flavors: Revolution, Supernova, and Voltage in the Dewmocracy campaign. Mountain Dew drinkers were to vote online for their favorite drink flavor, and that one would be kept permanently, while the other ones would only be a part of Mountain Dew’s history. However, I noticed that the flavors were only sold in 12 packs of cans, at least in the Austin area. As an avid Mountain Dew fan, I went through two 12-packs of Mountain Dew to compare flavors, even though I never buy cans of soda, but try to limit drinking soda to when I go out to eat. I found myself sharing my discovery of the new Mountain Dew’s and bringing a few cans of the soda to share with my other Mountain Dew-drinking coworkers. I also presumed to go on their website and check out what other fans were saying. I found the Mountain Dew campaign was not just a way to get the best flavor of Mountain Dew to be chosen, but also a way to create the user experience of community, sense of democracy and choice, and personal freedom and control. All of that could be found in a simple soft drink.

The other marketing experience that I notice a lot is chick flick movies. As I watched “He’s Just Not That Into You” with a bunch of my girl friends, I realized how much we related to the movie as we talked about it once the credits started rolling. The theater experience and hearing when everyone laughs, or especially when you hear only a few men chuckle, gives the whole movie a new sense of meaning. If I had waited to rent it and watched it by myself, the movie would barely be half as good. When you experience it together with a bunch of other women and be like “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe we do that,” the feeling of understanding and relating to another woman is priceless. You feel their pains, their laughs, and every other rollercoaster ride emotion in between. We certainly do pay for the experience, and not just the 2 hours of entertainment.