ECP NetHappenings After Thanksgiving How Much Fun can Mr. Whipple Be?
Freston, Tom. Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu (pp. 35-36).
“You’d be surprised. I’ll give you a stack of background research on Charmin to read over the weekend. You will be laughing out loud.” On a cold January Saturday morning, I curled up on my couch and began reading. It would mark the end to my advertising career. After going over a bunch of the basic stuff, pre–/post–ad campaign awareness studies and attitudinal analyses, I came to the report that Steve must have been referring to as “hilarious.” It was a psychographic report that divided America, as only Procter & Gamble could, into three segments of toilet paper users: the rollers, the folders, and the crumplers. I saw myself as a crumpler. In my more meditative moments occasionally a roller. The folders, it turns out, were neat, deliberate folks. They carefully folded layers of paper on top of each other. Rollers, as you might imagine, wound the paper more liberally around their hand. They had a good opinion of themselves, less so for others—one respondent thought that crumpling the paper was “for barbarians.” But the prime target audience, the best customers, were the crumplers. They were the “devil-may-care impulsive individuals” who “liked the tough texture of the wad.” These crumplers were more anxious, had things to do. They weren’t sitting around reading the Saturday Evening Post on the can for a half hour. And where did all this important ass-wiping information lead? It turned out that crumplers used 20 percent more toilet paper per “session.” And they had more sessions. “Crumplers” were the coveted “heavy users,” the advertiser’s bull’s-eye. But how could one find them within the general population? Turned out, they were heavily concentrated. They lived side by side in major urban areas where, I supposed, anxiety was higher, and people were more time-pressured. My neighbor was probably also a crumpler. Media planners could target these wasteful defecators very easily by skewing the advertising spending to cities. I put down the report and went to Central Park for a heart-to-heart with myself.