Very interesting!!
Gillette lost my razor business 20+ years ago (aside from ‘vintage’).
They lost my shaving soap business almost 10 years ago.
I still purchase some Gillette DE blades, but mostly from ‘third world channels.’
The most recent PC campaign got me to reconsider other ‘personal care’ purchases.
I spend a fair amount of $ on shaving related stuff, but I am NOT in the Gilette target audience.
Satisfying the whims of a bunch of outliers is not likely to be a profitable effort for a multinational public corporation.
[...]consumers believe there is a direct relationship between price and quality.[...]
Most people I know would think me crazy for the amount of time I put into a shave. The people who shave like me are a minority and, as you said, most want a tolerably quick shave. Cartridges and canned foam definitely deliver that.But if we're talking about shaving, the vast majority of people who just want to look respectable define quality as a tolerably smooth and comfortable shave with a minimum of effort. TBH, if disposables and the Trac II and its descendants hadn't delivered that back in the '70s, everyone would still be using safety razors. In the way that most men define quality, cartridges do provide better quality. It's not *all* marketing. If that were the case, the Techmatic would have succeeded, but it failed, because the quality wasn't there.