Why the Gillette Commercials Make A Lot of Sense ... So What Who Cares, 5(3)
Hello!
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I love it when the universe synchronizes news stories, and this week's line-up is a particular doozy. Right after I finished reading Monica Hesse's fantastic Washington Post piece on how "traditional masculinity" makes its most ardent adherents the most deeply unhappy, I saw that a Gillette campaign exhorting men to maybe not bully people or mansplain or sexually harass others is getting pushback because some people don't like the idea that those behaviors are not showcasing men at their best. Others seem angered by the idea that there is more than one way to be a man in the world.
My own reaction is impatience:
I am baffled by the Moms of Boys™ who are existentially threatened by the idea of more than one way to be a man? Ma’am, you know this is not Sparta? You do not gain greater status by having manly sons die on their shield on the plains of Thermopylae. https://t.co/J10IzlUIKg
— Lisa Schmeiser (@lschmeiser) January 15, 2019
(My kingdom for an edit button on Twitter, because "shield" and not "shields" is killing me.)
But I am also really into what this campaign says about who Proctor & Gamble wants to buy their product and why they feel comfortable running this campaign in 2019.
So what? This is another example of companies deciding that it's more lucrative for them to espouse a particular value than to pretend that they're a neutral actor in the U.S. Since the 2016 election, more American corporations have voiced political stances instead of taking the policy that remaining publicly apolitical was good business. As the New York Times reported in 2017:
In recent days, after the Charlottesville bloodshed, the chief executive of General Motors, Mary T. Barra, called on people to “come together as a country and reinforce values and ideals that unite us — tolerance, inclusion and diversity.”
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan said, “The equal treatment of all people is one of our nation’s bedrock principles.”
Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, criticized Mr. Trump by name for his handling of the violence in Charlottesville, and called for healing.
[...] The forthright engagement of these and other executives with one of the most charged political issues in years — the swelling confidence of a torch-bearing, swastika-saluting, whites-first movement — is “a seminal moment in the history of business in America,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a board member at PepsiCo.
This is, in part, because the current political climate and the proliferation of social media have helped expand the definition of boycotts from targeting businesses specific labor practices to targeting their presumed political agendas. It's bad business to ignore political consumerism, especially in an age where people know they can vote with their dollars and have ways to organize where money goes thanks to social media as an emergent and diffuse mass medium.
(It's also worth noting that the Gillette ad campaign does not presage an era of snowflake stubble for all. Fox News still boasts Gillette parent company Proctor and Gamble as an advertiser on the Sean Hannity show, and once social media attention to brand boycotting stopped, Dollar Shave Club went right on back to advertising on the cable channel too. There's more than one way to sell a razor.)
Who cares? Corporate investors are going to be watching very closely to see if the trend of companies incorporating political identities into their brands translates to profits.
Brand engagement in social issues only works for shareholders so long as the brand continues to clock good results. So far as investors are concerned, a company's number-one job is to make money. Any social change on the side is a perk, not a core requirement.
The minute a specific position ceases to be a branding asset for a company, expect shareholder pressure, board members pushing for change and/or a major executive to step down before the company makes a show of contrition and retreats to "We're all the same, so please buy our stuff."
Remember: all ad campaigns exist to sell stuff, not ideas. Gillette's campaign is calibrated to raise brand awareness among the adults who came of age debating one another over social media and are more prone to think that gender norms are formed in no small part by societal pressures. It's a smart move -- people form brand loyalties early in adulthood and carry them through their lives. (Especially since older consumers are less risk-tolerant than younger ones.)
By appealing to the consumers who are just forming their brand loyalties now, Gillette is betting on its future customer base. Whether or not they manage to change the dialogue on what it means to be a man is merely a side benefit.
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Your pop culture recommendation of the day: Whenever I stumble across a writer's recitation of an anecdote or phrase that I recall from their earlier work, I'm thrilled. It's a clue into the mind and heart of the writer — beyond what they're willing to share in their work — and I love getting a new bit of information to understand the writer better.
Which is to say that the new Julia Reed book, South Toward Home, is a pleasant read for those of us versed in Reediana and a very specific portrait of the working lifestyle writer in late middle age. This collection of columns from Garden and Gun magazine is an excellent introduction to those of you who have not yet read Reed. Each Reed piece is witty, gracious and possessed of an extremely precise sense of place, and each argues the merits of a life slowed down to the point where it can be well-lived.
From an anthropological perspective: the argument over old south vs. new south reared its head in the Amazon.com reviews and will be greatly amusing to those of anyone who has been reading southern writers for forever.
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