Women in Italy Like To Clean but Shun The Quick and Easy:
Italian women keep some of the cleanest homes around.They spend, on average, 21 hours a week on household chores other than cooking — compared with just four hours for Americans, according to Procter & Gamble Co. research. Italians wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week, Americans just once. Italians typically iron nearly all their wash, even socks and sheets. And they buy more cleaning supplies than women elsewhere do.
All that should make them the perfect customers for the manufacturers of cleaning products.
But when Unilever launched an all-purpose spray cleaner about six years ago, the product flopped. And when Procter & Gamble tested its top-selling Swiffer Wet mop, which eliminates the need for a clunky bucket of water, the product bombed so badly in Italy that P&G took it off the market.
What the world’s biggest consumer-products companies failed to realize is that what sells products elsewhere — labor-saving convenience — is a big turnoff here. Italian women want products that are tough cleaners, not timesavers.
American housewives presented cake-mix marketers with a similar dilemma a half-century ago, when the first mixes failed to catch on. Once the powdered eggs were removed, and the cook had to add fresh eggs, the mixes caught on — because the housewife wasn’t “cheating” anymore.