Monday 22 February 2016

Fun Online Polls: Shaving & The US presidential race

The results to last week's poll were as follows:

The power of advertising: do you use a dry-electic shaver or disposables?

Dry/electric - 23%
Disposables - 28%
Both - 20%
Neither - 29%


One 'other' was cut-throat razor, fair enough. Roy said safety razor with replaceable blades, which I would count as disposables.

I asked the question because I was puzzled by the vast amount of advertising for disposable relative to advertising for dry/electric. It would appear that they know what they are doing, as more people use the former than the latter, so there's more to play for and people replace them more often.

Thanks to all 102 of you who took part and helped clear that up for me.
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This whole US presidential election thingy is dragging on and on, it won't be over until November, at a cost of billions of dollars

So let's see if we can predict it for them for a minimum of hassle. This week we will choose a candidate from each party and next week we'll have the final round.

List of candidates from a recent The New York Times, don't blame me for inaccuracies and omissions.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

3 comments:

Lola said...

I wet shave. I have been using a Gillette product. Each disposable blade cartridge lasts about a week. The ones I buy retail at about £11.50 +/- £1 for ten blades. That's about £1.15 / blade / week.
Assume UK population approx 50/50 men women and that about about 20% of men don't shave (pre-pubescent. grow beards etc) that makes about 25.6 million men use razors. That's £29.5M per week or about £353M per year. Minimum.
If you have ever watched 'How It's Made' you will know that production engineering is able to get the production cost of razor blades down to pennies.
Being a bit of a saddo one of my treats when travelling overseas is to do some some shopping in a local supermarket to compare prices of various uniform items between there and here. Razor blades seem to be about the same price where ever you go.
The profits must be huge once you've got it going. To keep those profits going you have to keep your brand up there and you have to try various bits of innovation to differentiate your own product. Those innovations are more blades and swively heads.
If I were younger I get into the gents razor business.

Graeme said...

I am slightly surprised that "neither" is the largest category. Either your readers include more women than I suspected (although of course many of them use razors) or more beardies than you would assume, or else they shave using shards of glass or other exotic methods.

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, yes, they have got the manufacturing down pat, but it then they have to spend a fortune on advertising. There hasn't been a new entrant for donkey's years, except maybe people who do own brand stuff for supermarkets (i.e. Shiney).

G, I didn't both with minor categories like safety, cut-throat, plucking, waxing, burning, hair removal cream and heck knows what else. Or perhaps they wear beards or are female voters (but surely most of them use something occasionally).