A Weird Thing Just Happened In Sex Toy Marketing

For a brief astrological moment this week, just for a fleeting speck of colour in the infinite column of time’s light, the sex toy stars aligned.

This week, a sex toy brand named Womanizer released a showerhead designed for masturbation. That alone is pretty interesting. An hour later, a rival sex toy brand, with the much less bad and far more good name of ‘Love Not War,’ launched a campaign about how people should stop masturbating with showerheads.

One rival launching a showerhead, the other condemning showerheads, in exactly the same cosmic instant. And the weirdest part? I worked on both of these campaigns, and had no idea it was going to go down like this. So what happened?

Some context.

About a year and a half ago, my manager at what was then called Wow Tech, now called Lovehoney Group, pulled me aside to whisper excitedly in my ear about a new Womanizer product in development.

“It’s a shower head,” she said conspiratorially, and scanned my face for a reaction, finding incredulity in place of enthusiasm.

“We’re… making a shower head?” I asked, confident in my cynicism that it would never actually happen.

“Yeah, isn’t that cool?” she said.

“It’ll never actually happen,” I think I might have said out loud.

Things like this get kicked around sex toy marketing rooms all the time and never come to anything. Perhaps that’s for the best. I was once in the boardroom of a major sex toy brand in which we all briefly got terribly excited about an idea for a bra with a masturbation cup between the breasts. CAN. You. IMAGINE.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she continued, the conspiracy deepening. “But it’s with Hansgrohe, the shower designer. They approached us, it was their idea. We already have prototypes.”

Holy shit. Prototypes. So it was real. Not only was it real, it was pretty awesome. And for a while, it was the worst kept secret around Womanizer’s HQ in Berlin, after it was accidentally and hilariously announced to the entire business by a junior copywriter at an All-Hands meeting.

Skip forward a year, and I’m now running my own boutiquey little creative agency for the adult industry, The Afterglow. The owner of another agency, with whom I often work, called me one ordinary day.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said, with that familiar tone of conspiracy. “But Love Not War got approached about doing a showerhead campaign.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, not willing to commit to an emotion about it. I’d been burned on the showerhead thing before.

“No shit Stu,” she said. “I think it’s an award-winner.”

She talked me through the idea, and then I did manage to commit to an emotion. Jealousy. Professional jealousy, that I hadn’t thought of it myself.

The idea was a simple one. Masturbation in the shower is costing us millions of litres of wasted water every year, and as the pleasure industry’s leading sustainable sex toy brand, Love Not War was the business to say something about it.

These two things, Womanizer’s showerhead campaign and Love Not War’s anti-showerhead campaign were developed in absolute isolation from each other, completely unrelated, until they were inexplicably both launched at exactly the same time. Literally minutes apart.

Imagine the feeling of thrilling smugness, sitting on a campaign only to see your competitor release a product straight into your campaign’s hands minutes before you went live. It’s like heroin. Probably. I wouldn’t know. It’s like smoking opium at gunpoint in Kyrgyzstan. I know about that.

Anyway, it must have looked like Love Not War was deliberately pissing on Womanizer’s chips, especially because the response on social media to Womanizer’s showerhead was not overwhelmingly positive, and also because of my own complex departure from that brand. It must have looked planned. I would dearly love to claim such prescience, but I’m more of a minute-to-minute planning person than a year-to-year one. Disorganised, in other words. I had no idea it was happening. But it was fun.

Fun, and revealing.

The Womanizer Wave, that’s the name of their showerhead, is really, really interesting. I would have loved to have worked on it more than I did. I think the only fair criticism of Womanizer’s product is that it’s maybe a little gimmicky — even though I don’t really believe that to be true. I think my old manager’s excitement was right: it’s a cool project, a sex toy hidden in plain sight. It’s weird to me that they chose not to really lean into that fact in their marketing: you could have had a lot of fun with that concept. There’s a lot to say, a lot to work with, a lot to market. Instead, they went conventional, conservative, and po-faced. They made something incredibly interesting incredibly boring. Perhaps it was a budget thing.

Love Not War, on the other hand, was having fun. Instead of the usual, overly-sincere, scare-mongering that comes with an ecological message, we went with heartfelt humour. That just… works better today. It just does. People don’t gravitate towards the perfumery and brand poetry like they used to. In austere times, people are less aspirational.

And Love Not War’s commitment to sustainability is real, they can easily defend themselves from accusations of greenwashing: their products are made from recycled aluminium cans. They use friggin’ organic soy ink for the text on their recycled packaging forchrissakes. They’re the real deal.

Fun, right?

But that’s not the point, none of it is the point.

The point is that this latest example of convergent evolution, two competing and reputable sex toy brands both suddenly talking about showers at the same time, is itself indicative of a maturing of our industry.

Us marketers in the pleasure industry have got used to having to find innovative routes to customers, because for the longest time no one wanted to carry our ads. We relied on sneaky product placement, celebrity endorsement, and word of mouth. We got good at it, and after a while we did find advertisers. 50 Shades was a large part of that.

But that faded away very quickly. Sex toy news was no longer news, and the novelty of novelties had worn off. We got so good at it that, now, once again, we have to dig really deep for ideas to get noticed by mainstream press. Victims of our own success, I suppose.

That’s how these two brands landed on showers at the same point in time, though in opposite ways. Through looking creatively for spaces that might be unexplored, by forcing a consumer to look at things a little differently, by getting in front of them in their homes.

However you cut it, this unexpected marketing synchrony is good for the whole industry, and right now, what’s good for the industry is generally good for the consumer. It proves that those of us who have been doing this awhile still have that spark, and it’s sparkier than ever. It demonstrates that we haven’t got complacent, that we’re willing to try new things and explore uncharted territory.

That’s good for the consumer because, forgive my exceptionalism, our industry is unlike any other in the world. Our customers have a uniquely personal and intimate relationship with us. The better the industry gets, the more we respect that intimate and personal connection with them.

Sorry for pissing on your chips on this one though, Womanizer.

It’s nothing personal. But it is intimate.

Right, I need a shower.