Now this is old news I learned recently but it’s really a thing, millennials don’t understand fabric softener, so they don’t buy it.
As a millennial, I can assure you I don’t understand it either. Then I googled it and found out it coats the fabric with chemicals to make your fabric feel softer. I found out after writing this it has to do with drying your clothes outside before dryers.
Still I never really understood fabric softener. It feels like one of those things people do, because people do it. As more of us took on our own laundry duties, we realized we don’t actually need the fabric softener.
Or maybe more of us live where dryers are.
The companies like Proctor & Gamble tried to use the media to instill in us a need to use fabric softener.I don’t think it worked, but it’s an interesting lesson in how cultural norms can change.
Those changes can literally kill your product.
Millenials don’t kill industries, companies fail to remain relevant
The truth is, if fabric softener was a relevant product we all needed, we would spend that money.
The lotion people have done really well. Currently I’m being advertised to get lotion so I look more rejuvenated all the time. The cultural norms have shifted in a way where male beauty products are being hustled at levels that have never been hustled before.
Why is Fox and them not writing articles about how millennials are birthing industries? I mean maybe they are, but I’m sure once it hit socials they went nowhere. People want to see us as villains.
But really we’re just broker than our parents, relatively speaking. This is on average, as a group. Some of us are willing to hustle for the lives we want.
After watching the tomfoolery that is middle-class home ownership take place, we all started thinking about how we wanted to live. What things that everyone just does are actually relevant. Turns out, it just means certain products, like fabric softener, are probably not going to be the money makers they once were.
The question remains, who really is to blame?
Clearly it’s the companies who produce fabric softener that are to blame
These folk took for granted that people would behave as they have done.
I’ve been in plenty of marketing meetings listening to older executives describe the habits they know. Often I’d be wildly confused as everything they did naturally was so different from how I lived. As time went on, we found out that people under 40 spend money super differently, mostly because we can’t buy houses and stuff.
A whole other industry we millennials apparently killed.
I don’t remember a single ad for fabric softener in my life. Not once was it inserted carefully into a cultural moment. If anything I learned to buy pricier clothes with better materials for mating purposes.
I want shit that’s soft after I pull it out the dryer the 25th time.
Our habits evolved based on what’s available to us. With things like Klarna, we can easily purchase expensive stuff. Things that were previously gatekept.
Even fast fashion clothing items are soft for long enough that the idea of fabric softener sounds foreign. Especially considering it has a function for a whole use case. Maybe if they convinced us to stop using dryers the industry would not have been hit so hard.
A 6$ cotton T-shirt is plenty soft and socially acceptable to make money with.
Why pass blame, make your stuff lit instead.
Creating the context for your product is the best way to sell it
The idea is to create a problem for people and then solve it.
Clothes were clearly not soft enough, so people used fabric softener. Maybe it gave the clothes a particular feel that people liked. The internet told me it also makes clothes deteriorate faster and it’s bad for the longevity of quality items.
Maybe the product was kind of nonsense in the first place. Maybe it was just a band-aid solution so people who were compromising elsewhere could feel better. We are in a privileged time now where our poorest people technically live better than the rich of yesteryear.
Just think about what Uber Eats really means for our life. You can have whatever food you want delivered to you without having to talk to people. Kings of the past would be very jealous of how good you eat today.
If people wanted to sell fabric softener, they would have found a real value for it. If there is none, then we millennials did not kill it. We just saw that the product no longer has value to us. The product was not made more valuable at all. It’s the same as ever.
So we moved on.
If you don’t want your product to die, then you need to control culture.
Otherwise everything comes and goes.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
Comments