Toxic marketing: Gillette and that infamous ‘#MeToo’ video
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2019 16:21:22 +0000
THE disposable razor has exactly one use: to remove unwanted hair from human skin. Although various refinements have been applied to it over the years, the product concept has remained uncomplicated, and so has its natural market: humans, primarily men but also women, who have skin and who for reasons of hygiene or personal grooming choices wish to efficiently and painlessly remove hair from it.
Marketing the disposal razor — a straightforward product with a market that comprises practically every living adult human – should be virtually impossible to get wrong. Disposal razor manufacturer Gillette, however, managed to do precisely that earlier in the week by posting a video to its YouTube channel embracing last year’s “#MeToo” movement and taking aim at “toxic masculinity.”
The video, just under two minutes long, is titled “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” a twist on Gillette’s decades-old brand tagline, “The best a man can get.” The video delivers a clumsy moral lesson, contrasting stereotypical “toxic masculine” behavior — bullying, fighting, catcalling, sexualized humor, and patronizing women — with socially acceptable behavior, such as stopping the fight, chasing away the bullies, and scolding the friend for making inappropriate remarks to women.
Except for the vague nod to years of its earlier advertising by mocking the company’s own copyrighted tagline, the video does not at any point refer to the product supposedly being marketed.
Evidently, a majority of Gillette’s male target market did not appreciate being lectured on morality by their supplier of personal hygiene appliances. As of Thursday night, the video had more than 15 million views, and reactions were decidedly negative with “dislikes” outnumbering “likes” by better than two-to-one. Many of the comments left by viewers were declarations that they were switching brands out of disgust; for a brief time on Wednesday, the hashtag #GilletteBoycott was trending on Twitter.
Although a few social media observers suggested that the “toxic” video may have been a sublime publicity stunt — in objective terms, it did make the Gillette brand a topic of public conversation for a time — it is hard to imagine that Gillette purposely sought to offend roughly two-thirds of the brand’s target market. Still, the whole sorry episode was not completely without purpose, because it does provide an excellent lesson in what not to do in seeking to establish social responsibility credibility.
The fatal flaws in Gillette’s message are not in its salient points, but in its presentation and association with a controversial, morally questionable perspective. The essence of the message is that good men do not treat women in a disrespectful or condescending manner, do not use violence to resolve conflicts, and are mindful of how their behavior serves as a role model for young boys. Nobody would argue that those points are debatable, or that is inappropriate for Gillette or any other company whose target market is mostly men to raise them.
A more positive message would have more effectively met the real objective of the marketing exercise, which, after all, is to encourage the target market to purchase more Gillette disposable razors.
A message that subtly implies, “Good men use Gillette,” or conversely, “Using Gillette will help make you a good man” works. A message that states in inelegantly direct terms that good behavior is the exception for an entire gender does not.
Tapping into current zeitgeist is a common marketing strategy, but as Gillette has demonstrated it is a risky one. For one thing, timing is important. The #MeToo “movement” is so last year, because the public attitude is evolving to reject the concept of “toxic masculinity” as being as sexist as the behavior it presumes to describe. The term — which Gillette highlights in its video — makes an immutable part of the being of half the population of the planet a problem that must be condemned. Indeed, there are men who are thoughtless, abusive jackasses; but that is not “masculinity,” that is unacceptable, boorish behavior. There are women who are emotionally manipulative gold-diggers, but no one (apart from perhaps the most boorish of men) would dare to tag that as “toxic femininity,” and for good reason — stereotypes are as inaccurate as they are offensive.
Six months ago before the public began to rethink its attitude, Gillette may have gotten away with its ham-handed attempt at virtue-signaling. Now, its message simply comes across as insincere and out of step. Again, it is worth emphasizing that none of this has anything at all to do with the product Gillette is actually trying to sell; it provides no actively positive cue for potential new customers to try its product, or for existing customers to continue using it. By choosing to attach itself to a controversial advocacy — or perhaps more accurately, an unproductively harmful iteration of an otherwise laudable one — Gillette has done worse, providing an actively negative cue to provoke at least some of its existing and potential customer base to reject its product.
Social awareness and responsibility can be a powerful factor in branding and marketing, but as Gillette has demonstrated, it must be used thoughtfully. Get Real Philippines’ Benign0 insightfully offered an alternative in a post not long after the Gillette video hit the proverbial fan: A far better option for the company — one that would provide a clear product tie-in, tap a much broader current moral sentiment, and provide opportunities for measurable action – would have been to address what is perhaps the only bad feature of the disposal razor, the fact that it is a chunk of eventual planet-killing plastic waste.
On the other hand, that would require Gillette and its parent company P&G to actually do something other than produce a two-minute video. The fact that the company opted for the latter and apparently dismissed or didn’t even consider the far more worthwhile environmental question is perhaps the most damning indictment of its marketing cynicism.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
The post Toxic marketing: Gillette and that infamous ‘#MeToo’ video appeared first on The Manila Times Online.