By Peter Berton
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Sex always has been used to sell nicotine-laden products: first cigarettes and cigars, followed by e-cigarettes, liquid nicotine “vaporizers” and hookahs. XXX Vapor takes this model to its logical extreme by showing porn actresses savoring their vaporizers in oh-so-many ways.
XXX Vapor is the brainchild of President and Chief Executive Officer Joshua Berkowitz, who serves in the same capacities for XXX Vapor’s parent company, World Wide Vapor Distributors and its media development branch C11Media.
The stakes are huge: U.S. retail and online sales of e-cigarettes hit $1.7 billion last year, and the “consumption of e-cigs may overtake traditional cigarettes in the next decade,” said Bonnie Herzog, a tobacco analyst with Wells Fargo, recently told CNBC.
What led a mainstream company like World Wide Vapor to market a vaporizer product targeted to adult entertainment consumers?
“From a mile-high perspective, the premise behind XXX Vapor is simple: Sex sells,” Berkowitz said. “There’s a lot more to it from a business perspective, but we leverage the social engagement of our models — notably name recognition for vendor incentives.”
YNOT: From where did the marketing concept for XXX Vapor come?
Joshua Berkowitz: We have been in the vapor market for a couple years within the mainstream market and have seen great success with those brands. In response to our mainstream success, we looked at niches that met our demographic criteria and we could tailor our marketing towards; hence the evolution of XXX Vapor.
With my experience in adult marketing, I knew we could leverage the massive exposure available through adult and take advantage of our connections within the industry to bring our product to the forefront of product marketing within the space.
You sell these products only through adult sales outlets, correct?
Yes. What we do is brand and market our vaporizer line exclusively within the adult media channels, for distribution to brick-and-mortar adult retail stores and online adult retailers.
Who is your target audience?
Our target demographic is mainly males 18-35, mostly smokers and tokers. However, we find our demographics shifting to even a broader scope with the continued education of consumers about portable vaporizers and e-cigarettes.
With the launch of our female attraction e-cig Swarovski series and XXX Vibe attachment [a vibrator that attaches to the vaporizer], we are gearing products to our female customer base, as well, this year.
How do you promote to your target audience?
We engage our end users through extensive social media campaigns as well as through our retailers, which are primarily adult novelty retailers. We leverage our content creation company, C11Media, to bring sexy and fun content featuring our product line to multimedia collateral as well as to our XXX Gear and Merchandise line, which features porn star calendars, posters, t-shirts and more.
We also work with various studios to produce content incentives for our retailers to offer customers, such promotions as free “Glamour Gone Bad” scenes currently available at select retailers. The scene feature Vanessa Veracruz, Brandy Aniston and Elle Alexandra.
How well is the marriage of sex and vapor going?
I have to say it’s going very well. We set out to make an impact and create the first vapor product marketed extensively inside of adult, and we have seen great success with our business model.
It’s exciting to see that we have created the basis for future product releases in the space for mainstream products, which we will continue to develop both with vapor products and other mainstream products we market.
What are your future plans?
We will be adding more novel vapor-related products as well as expanding our XXX Gear extensively.
We are shooting our first mainstream and adult commercials this summer that will launch our new XXX Angels media campaign, which will be something like the VS angels version for adult brand ambassadorship.
