From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [14]
We’re having different problems with a product called Feminique. It’s a vaginal-odor spray, plain and simple, but the magazines and the networks have decided in their minds that this country is not quite ready for the word vagina. We can’t even say what our product is.
Feminine hygiene is going to be a big business for agencies. Our stuff, Feminique, is selling well. FDS is doing well. Johnson & Johnson came out with Vespré and it’s doing well. The American businessman has discovered the vagina and like it’s the next thing going. What happened is that the businessman ran out of parts of the body. We had headaches for a while but we took care of them. The armpit had its moment of glory, and the toes, with their athlete’s foot, they had the spotlight, too. We went through wrinkles, we went through diets. Taking skin off, putting skin on. We went through the stomach with acid indigestion and we conquered hemorrhoids. So the businessman sat back and said, ‘What’s left?’ And some smart guy said, ‘The vagina.’ We’ve now zeroed in on it. And this is just the beginning. Today the vagina, tomorrow the world. I mean, there are going to be all sorts of things for the vagina: vitamins, pep pills, flavored douches like Cupid’s Quiver (raspberry, orange, jasmine, and champagne). If we can get by with a spray, we can sell anything new. And the spray is selling. In the first few months of 1969 the manufacturer of Feminique put something like $600,000 worth of it into the stores in test areas without one commercial ever being on the air. The maker of Feminique expects to break even if he has sales of $1,500,000 in the first year. But before the advertising even starts he’s got $600,000 in the till. He’s going to make it on reorders alone.
The first commercial we shot for Feminique was almost a disaster. We had a Swedish model walking through the woods in a scene very much like a take from the movie Elvira Madigan. The trouble was the girl couldn’t speak English and then we discovered she couldn’t even speak Swedish. And she was wooden. We shot the commercial up in a place called Sterling Forest, which is near Tuxedo Park, New York. When you’re shooting commercials, people come around and ask you funny questions. A woman came up to me in the middle of the shooting and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Oh, this is a commercial for Feminique.’ Now she’s never heard of Feminique, nothing had broken in the New York market, and yet she says, ‘Oh, I use it all the time.’
I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘And my husband uses it too.’ I raised my eyebrows a little bit. I said, ‘Do the children use it?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, no, we wouldn’t let the children use it. Just my husband and me.’ I politely thanked her and told her that the people at Feminique would be very happy to hear.
Some campaigns go bad for strange reasons. My partner, Ron Travisano, was working at Marschalk when they got a cake mix that was almost too good for the marketplace. All you had to do to make a cake was add water, but the product was going nowhere. They ran tests and then they ran more tests. They found out that the average housewife hated the product because if she couldn’t do something physical in the making of the cake, she felt that she was being cheated. If all she had to do was add water, well, she felt that she really was nowhere as a homemaker and a cook. The product was just too slick.
So they pulled it back and did whatever you do to cake mixes and they fixed it so now to make a cake you had to break an egg. In the instructions they said if you break an egg into this mix and add water, you’re going to have one hell of a cake. But without the