Years ago, Procter & Gamble paid me to sit in strangers’ homes. It’s called ethnographic research. Instead of dragging consumers into a focus group facility with the one-way mirror and the bowl of M&M’s, you go to them. You sit on their couch. You watch how they actually live. It’s the closest thing marketing has to telling the truth.
This particular house belonged to a guy doing fine by every visible measure. Good income. Wife, kids, nice neighborhood. And his house looked like a dorm room the morning after finals. Clothes on the couch. Dishes migrating across every flat surface. Laundry in geological layers.
The study was about fragrance. And fragrance, it turns out, makes people want to sound sophisticated. So this man — surrounded by the evidence — leaned back and told me, dead serious, how fastidious he is. Meticulous. A place for everything and everything in its place.
