In Poop Culture, Dave Praeger writes about the irony of the Poop Industry's brand images:
Smiling toddlers and fluffy clouds and teddy bears are darling, but few households are buying toilet paper because they think it's cute. Americans look to their toilets to choke down the burritos we eat and the beer we drink, but toilet manufacturers feign to think that each of us is an interior designer at heart, more concerned about color scheme than with colon scum.
Why the lack of branding and segmentation?
Where is the Jeep of toilets, that mud-splattered workhorse that can send your man-sized crap to the brownest depths of hell? Where is the environmentally friendly flush toilet with the kind of holistic outlook that appeals to hybrid car owners? Where is the toilet for cool people who get laid?
They don't exist, because any attempt to position butt-related products in ways more relevant to the consumer experience would involve acknowledgement of poop, which would immediately alienate those who don't want to be seen as people who poop, much less consumers of poop-related products. Fecal denial is the aggregate reality of the marketplace. And its cost is a lack of segmentation -- an inefficient market too constrained by taboo to realize its profit potential.
