Episode Details

Here’s an age-old marketing truth: sex sells. But marketing sex, or sexual wellness for that matter, can be a tough subject to bear. Within today’s oversaturated marketplace, marketers are fighting not just for attention on shelves and landing pages, but also for customers’ eyeballs. But when you’re marketing a taboo product, such as a sexual wellness cream, those challenges are magnified and building product awareness becomes your number one goal.

“This is a category that people don't even know is something that they're missing. There is no need-gap. You're filling as much as building an aspiration. There is a product here that's going to improve your sexual function. And this is something it's a first of its kind, it's a breakthrough. 

That’s Bulbul Hooda, Head of Brand and CMO for Vella Bioscience, a CBD-infused pleasure serum designed to act as ‘Viagra’ for women. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Hooda joined me for a candid conversation on the challenges she faces as a marketer marketing a product that consumers might want and need but could be nervous to approach. She discussed the need to normalize products such as pleasure serums, how Vella Bella manages goes about product awareness, and to succeed in a competitive eCommerce environment. Enjoy this episode.

Main Takeaways:

• Marketing a category that people don’t know exists: When you have an entirely new product category, you have to get the word out about what the product is before you can convince people that they need it. Doing unbranded campaigns in a market like this can go a long way to educating your prospective customers.  
• Marketing to Gen Z: As the next generation, Gen Z, has more spending power, their unique interests, and purchasing priorities are starting to affect markets and the products on offer. Gen Z is tending to use wellness categories, self-elevation, and self-improvement. 
• Test a variety of channels before launch: Test your systems to ensure everything is correctly in place before launch. Run a silent campaign to see if things get rejected. Test whether email might be a stronger channel and shift resources away from social or put effort into retail play. This mixing and matching are better the more and you also need to be analyzing that. 
• Power of Agency Partnerships: The debate about whether or not to use a marketing agency or to keep everything in-house has pros and cons any way you cut it. The benefits of hiring an agency include tapping into their resources both in terms of manpower, time, expertise in a specific field, and relationships they already have in the market.   

Key Quotes:

“This is a category that people don't even know is something that they're missing. There is no need-gap. You're filling as much as building an aspiration. There is a product here that's going to improve your sexual function. t's a breakthrough. To create that I needed to have those skillsets in my arsenal. Believing in my intuition, obsessively knowing my consumer. The third bit is building a brand together, piece by piece and that is something I truly learned at Unilever.” 

“Two things were happening because of the pandemic. Beauty was declining in color cosmetics. North America is a color cosmetics market. Second, what we are seeing is Gen Z becoming a critical purchasing group. Younger kids have more money, they're buying stuff, and they are leaning towards wellness categories, self-elevation improvement.” 

“[Social advertising issues] were definitely a small setback, learning every time we put an ad out, our website would get blocked. [Then] you [have to] wait out seven days. Thankfully we were testing this two months before launch. We use social both for or