How To Sell a Tampon
How advertisers market products you're not supposed to talk about.
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Early Kotex
Throughout history (and in many parts of the world today), women used rags, sheepskin, or nothing at all to deal with their periods. Getting women to pay for something that had basically been free was a challenge for advertisers, especially given the intimate nature of the product. Ads for the earliest pads featured women who represented this ideal market: exquisite, exclusively white, and wealthy ladies of fashion and leisure. This idealized femcare world of designer frocks, exotic locales, and resorts lasted for decades.
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Early Tampax
In 1931, Tampax (from “tampon” and “vaginal pack”) offered the first tampon with a built-in applicator. Despite the innovation, the inventor couldn’t attract sponsorship and had to sell the patent and trademark two years later. Women worried a tampon would block flow rather than absorb it; people also feared it would deflower virgins and was too sexually stimulating. Tampax ran its first mass-market ads in 1936, yet faced resistance until ‘45, when the Journal of the American Medical Association gave tampons a thumbs-up.
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The War Years
America’s entry into WWII had a significant effect on femcare advertising. Earlier ads had stoked anxiety about leaking, discomfort, and detection, but during the ‘40s, when women were expected to contribute to the war effort, any sort of self-indulgent fearfulness about menstruation became unpatriotic. Advertisers now urged women to take menstruation and its inconveniences in stride: “Why be a deserter,” the ad pictured asks, when Kotex pads were all an American girl needed to get through the month?
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What Smells?
Fear of vaginal odor has always been exploited by femcare manufacturers and advertisers. To this day, many women buy douches, scented tampons, and deodorant vaginal wipes—despite possible health risks and questionable efficacy. The wackiest (and scariest) campaign promoted Lysol as a vaginal deodorizer. Its tagline,“For married women,” hinted that it could also prevent unwanted pregnancy. Douching with Lysol was aggressively marketed from the 1920s until the early ‘60s, despite the internal scalding and vaginal infections it caused countless women.
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"Modess ... because"
One of the greatest ad campaigns of all time may have been Young and Rubicam’s for Modess pads. Each ad featured unknown beauties like Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh, all wearing exclusive designs by Balenciaga, Valentino, and Christian Dior, and was styled by craftspeople like Diane Arbus and shot by cutting-edge fashion photographers like Horst and Cecil Beaton. Consisting of only two words (“Modess … because”) and zero reference to what the product actually did or was, the ads were wildly successful and ran from 1948 until the 1970s.
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By the Sea
Menstrual ads from the 1960s abounded in water imagery, often depicting women sailing, swimming, lounging by the pool, splashing in the surf, building sandcastles, or riding horses along the shore. While there may have been unconscious Freudian associations between water, the placenta, and even the unconscious, what came across strongly was far simpler. In purely visual terms, the ads imply that all women need to be ritually cleaned after their periods, as if by religious immersion in purifying water.
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Celebrity Plugs
The famous StayFree campaign from the 1980s featured Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby. Decades earlier, legendary photographer Lee Miller had been horrified to find that Kotex purchased a stock photo of her and used it in its ad, the first to feature a “real” person. In fact, while many celebrities have had few qualms about endorsing cigarettes, alcohol, or fur, only a few, including fellow gymnast Mary Lou Retton, actress Brenda Vaccaro, and, most recently, tennis star Serena Williams, have willingly appeared in femcare ads.
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New Freedom
In the early 1970s, the “second wave” of feminism included the passage of Title IX (which meant schools could no longer discriminate when it came to funding activities for girls), as well as the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Commercial femcare was also liberated: Self-adhesive pads replaced restrictive menstrual gear (sanitary belts, safety pins and clips, special panties), and new, super-absorbent materials allowed pad-makers to make their product significantly slimmer, lighter, and less detectable than before.
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It Even Absorbs the Worry
Procter & Gamble launched the super-absorbent tampon Rely in the mid-‘70s. Tragically, it absorbed a lot more than worry. Rely leached healthy mucus from the vagina and led to a mini-epidemic of the occasionally lethal Toxic Shock Syndrome. It was pulled from the market in 1980. But the fault lay with materials used in many, if not most, super-absorbent tampons of the time. While the most harmful were gradually phased out, up to 17 per 100,000 menstruating females still contract nonfatal TSS every year.
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Menstrual Suppression
In 2007, the FDA approved Lybrel, the first low-dose combination contraceptive pill developed to eliminate menstruation altogether. It could bring relief to women suffering from endometriosis, but they represent only a tiny percentage of the perceived market. Based on the ads, it seems anyone who laments missing yoga class because of cramps is a possible customer. The result: increased negative attitudes about menstruation, especially among younger women.
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Good for What Ails You
Another tricky sell: the vibrator, which was invented as a therapeutic treatment for hysteria. Dating back to ancient Greece, hysteria was blamed for unruly emotions in women until the '50s, when another poorly-defined condition, PMS, took its place. For centuries, doctors and midwives treated hysteria with manual stimulation to the point of “hysterical paroxysm.” The vibrator was invented in the late 19th century to expedite the process. Advertised as a massage tool, it quickly became a staple in doctors’ offices.
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12 of 12 Hot Flash
Aggressive and often misleading advertising made hormone replacement therapy (HRT) standard treatment for menopausal women, who thought it could stave off all effects of aging but didn't realize that FDA approval didn’t address possible long-term risks. We now know that while HRT has some proven health benefits, it also increases risk for blood clots, heart disease, stroke, and breast cancer. Today, HRT is marketed for short-term symptom relief, rather than as an elixir of youth.
