Bic Pens "For Her": Marketing Campaign Targets Wimmin, Gets Hilarious Product Reviews

I’ve talked before about genderised marketing, such as the reductive and lazy “this is for MANLY MEN ONLY” types of ad campaigns and the regressive ways that toys are aimed at children, so this time I want to take a look at some of the more ridiculous products that are marketed “for her”.

It seems that companies sometimes feel that a perfectly normal product that doesn’t have any connotations of gender suddenly needs to be marketed to women, because after all the default human person is male and women are a special interest group. Or at least that’s what some people seem to think the case is.

Most of the time when this happens, the end product looks like the result of a development meeting that consisted of someone saying “Make it pink! Wimmin love pink!”

The first of the products “for her” that got it incredibly wrong are the now legendary line of Bic pens called “Cristal For Her”. Advertised as pens with an “elegant design – just for her!” and a “thin barrel to fit a woman's hand” (our dainty lady fingers can’t be dealing with regular pens – they’re just so heavy!), it wasn’t long before the amazing Amazon commenters descended on the page with a series of hilariously sarcastic reviews.

Even Ellen Degeneres got in on the action, taking a brilliant pop at Bic for their ridiculous venture on her show.

Last year, ladies who were confused by their iPads and Kindles could breathe a sigh of relief, as the first “tablet for women” was launched by the Middle Eastern based Eurostar Group.

It’s called the ePad Femme and comes with a default pink background (of course) and pre-loaded apps (because downloading apps is too complicated for us girls!) for yoga, shopping, recipes and weight loss, as these are the only things that women are interested in.

But the condescending lady-technology doesn’t stop there! In Japan, Fujitsu launched a range of laptops for women called Floral Kiss, the aim of which was to “bring elegance to PCs”. They’re right! We’ve been using boy laptops all this time and they’re SO inelegant!

The laptop features a latch that can be opened easily “even by users with long fingernails” and has applications like Scrapbook, which “automatically stores and organizes pictures and URLs of the items, retail stores, recipes, and other content that users come across when they are casually browsing the web.” Thanks Fujitsu! I had no idea how to bookmark pages myself and how did you know that all I use the internet is for shopping and cooking? Amazing!

Have you come across any ridiculous products “for her”? And will you be investing in a pretty Bic biro for women to save your delicate lady-hands from those huge, unwieldy tree trunks known as regular pens?