Women smell a rat in P&G's 'anxiety sales' pitch

I felt more ridiculed than outraged when I saw the latest P&G advertisement claiming that women are naturally smelly and therefore need their products to become as clean and hygienic as men.

The advertisement was published this week on P&G China's WeChat Official Account.

Many of the outraged Weibo users argued that men are not naturally better. After all, many wives complain about how their husbands go to bed with smelly feet or how their pillows become greasy easily. But that's not the point.

The point is that it is 2022 and P&G still believed that it could take advantage of women to get its way, no matter if the purpose is to provoke controversy and then catch attention, or to "sell anxiety" to its targeted customers.

Women have long been "used" by unscrupulous business to promote sales of their products or services. These include ads for weight losing products tell women customers that their bodies are not perfect; skin care products that suggest age is women's arch-enemy; jewellery implying that the life of a woman is not "whole" without a diamond ring.

The media seems to add fuel to the flame as well. American journalist and novelist Caryl Rivers argued in her book "Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women" that media, in this case Western media, often gives gloomier news about women and their achievements. This message, often based on specious "scientific" studies and reports, gets played over and over again on media outlets purporting to be objective.

But women have grown stronger and figured out the trick here. Most would no longer buy the feeling of anxiety that is being attempted to be sold to them.

A friend of mine has been working in the marketing field for around 15 years, and she said she has given up on perfection, which is a key to cure anxiety.

"When I just graduated, I believed a woman should always display her best appearance in the workplace, so I spent a huge amount of time taking care of my hair, and paid great attention to matching the style of my clothes with that of shoes and purses," she said. "And I also believed a modern woman should always balance work and her family well."

But now she knows there shouldn't be so much "should" in one's life, or she might drive herself crazy.

"Now, in most cases, I don't even wear make-up in the office anymore," she told me. "And my boss and client are actually fine with it. So don't step into the trap of any stereotypes."

As for the "smelly ads?"

"Such companies can go screw themselves, they have fallen behind the times," she said with a laugh.

And hopefully P&G will receive the due punishment it deserves, because the ads has violated the country's Advertising Law.

Xu Weiqiang, a lawyer with Jiacheng Law Firm, told me that ads with "discriminative" contents are prohibited in China. Companies publishing such ads can receive penalties between 200,000 (US$31,430) and 1 million yuan.

I hope justice is served soon.