Gradual Change

I went to my local drugstore today to pick up razor blades. I wasn’t shocked by the price so much as I was by the realization that it’s taken me this long to be shocked by the price. $32 (taxes in) for eight blades, or $4 per blade. I poked around the web and found that back in the summer of 2006, Business Week published a story about analysts’ disappointment with softer than expected sales of Gillette’s new Fusion blade system. Reported in this story were some truly breathtaking numbers:

Between 1997 and 2004, Gillette’s sales increased by 50%, even though overall sales grew only in line with population.

Razor and blade sales comprised about 5% of Gillette parent, Proctor and Gamble’s, total 2006 sales of $68 billion, and made a disproportionate contribution to profits.

Since then P&G has continued to struggle along, seemingly unaffected by the logical assumption that consumers move to generic brands when recession looms large.

But perhaps the stumble over the Fusion hints at more to come, since I’m definitely feeling affected. The $4 razor blade shook me out of my stupor and made me question how I’ve been sucked in by generations of Gillette products to one of the oldest tricks in the book. In short it did the one thing marketing’s supposed to avoid at all costs: made me acutely aware of its heavy-handed presence.

It’s not that I’m anti-consumerist; quite the opposite as my friends would tell you. This week I get to drive an Audi that costs upwards of $150,000 and I’m sure I’ll love every self-indulgent minute. It’s more that there’s a point at which marketing crosses over from good-natured cajoling and begins to take me for a fool.

So I spent an hour or so this afternoon browsing for a traditional safety razor, brush and luxurious English shaving soap. Not to save money so much as to restore a sense of getting what I paid for. Much of what I read about the softness of badger hair versus boar hair and the relative heft and substance of different razors was surely influenced by marketers, but at least I felt myself returned to a world in which marketing’s job is to articulate tangible differences rather than use clever slight of hand to make me pay more for less.