Bon's Mots

Stumbled upon this lit­tle item on the Brand Week website:

Procter & Gamble’s Tampax brand an­nounced the launch of MonthlyGiftClub on teen and tween Web com­mu­nity Stardoll to pro­mote prod­ucts for that time of the month. 

Taking its cues from a tra­di­tion in TV ads — in which women are shown wear­ing white cloth­ing as a vi­sual cue that a brand’s san­i­tary prod­ucts are safe and ab­sorbent — Stardoll club mem­bers will re­ceive vir­tual ver­sions of white swim­suits, dresses and other frocks when the club meets cer­tain mem­ber­ship mile­stones, such as 10,000 or 50,000 mem­bers. The ef­fort specif­i­cally pro­motes Tampax Pearl, which has a Leak Guard fea­ture that pur­ports to help women “out­smart Mother Nature” so they can feel con­fi­dent wear­ing white.

Aside from the swag, Stardoll vis­i­tors can win prizes by cre­at­ing vir­tual sum­mer scenes, and they can re­ceive free sam­ples of Tampax prod­ucts by click­ing on an icon and en­ter­ing their per­sonal information.

As some of you know, I wrote a post in May about Always’ “Happy Period” brand­ing. Well, it seems the folks at Proctor and Gamble con­tinue to in­sist that the time of the month should be wel­comed — nay, cel­e­brated! “Monthly gift”? Does it come wrapped in a neat lit­tle bow, too?

This time, they’ve cre­ated a Second Life-type net­work­ing site where tween girls can cre­ate their own avatar and in­ter­act with each other in the vir­tual world (when they re­ceive their monthly gift, I presume). And in white clothes! I don’t know what re­al­ity these mar­ket­ing ge­niuses live in, but who wears white dur­ing a visit from their Aunt Flo? Every woman I know has ex­pe­ri­enced an “ac­ci­dent” in­volv­ing the Curse and white pants/skirt/shorts. The em­bar­rass­ment has been seared into our memories; I have a hard time even buy­ing white pants, let alone wear­ing them.

Virtual sum­mer scenes? How about one where your avatar ties a sweater around the waist­band of her white shorts be­fore run­ning home be­cause, oops, her pe­riod came ear­lier than ex­pected? (True story.) Or, your avatar is lay­ing on her vir­tual couch with a vir­tual heat­ing pad on her belly, gulp­ing down vir­tual Advil (hey Wyeth - found a prod­uct place­ment op­por­tu­nity for you) while her friends are frol­ick­ing at the vir­tual pool?

While I ap­plaud P&G’s foray into so­cial net­work­ing, I not sure this was the way to do it. Is it re­ally nec­es­sary? P&G en­joys a healthy mar­ket share due to its two old­est and largest brands in fem­i­nine hygiene, Always and Tampax. It also has a cap­tive audience; like toi­let paper, its prod­ucts are a ne­ces­sity. All we, the con­sumers, ask for are qual­ity goods that do the job. Period. (Sorry, couldn’t re­sist.) We don’t need colour­ful pack­ag­ing. We don’t want con­de­scend­ing cam­paigns. Is it any won­der I switched to o.b. (aside from re­duc­ing the amount of plas­tic ap­pli­ca­tors in our landfills)?

I could be sneaky, log in to Stardoll as pose as a 13-year-old girl to find out more (and cre­ate a lit­tle havoc). But I’m too hon­est for my own good, so I de­cided to just blog about it.

I imag­ine my avatar would look some­thing like this:

Look out! She’s wear­ing white!