Back on January 14th, 2019, we shared news about Gillette’s new ad campaign. What I referred to as “a virtue-signaling sop to the beta-male messaging of the modern left.”
Related: After Losing 8 Billion Gillette Drops Toxic Masculinity Ads – Returns to Basics.
Men beat women, sexually harass them. They are bullies who dismiss their behavior with platitudes. It’s time to be better. And oh, look, thanks to the #MeToo movement we are. That was the turning point. And Men are paying attention.
Gillette’s #woke trajectory resulted in an 8 billion dollar write off by their corporate masters at Proctor and Gamble just seven months later. Men, it appears, were not interested in buying products from a company that called them systemic abusers. And no government bailouts in sight.
Boohoo.
It has been nearly two years since that bit of marketing brilliance, and things have not improved. The brand continues to struggle but not as much as P&G trying to explain it away.
It’s weird, but as I perused this 10-K report, I found that there is only one P&G unit that may have an upcoming impairment charge, and that one unit is its “Shave Care” unit. Covid apparently isn’t having an impact on Old Spice sales (Old Spice is part of P&G’s “Beauty Care” division), but those same men still buying Old Spice aftershave have stopped buying Gillette razors. Yeah right. Or maybe it’s because P&G hasn’t yet run any commercials where it slanders its Old Spice users as bullies and sexual predators.
Ding!
And Ding, the realization too late that they’d done irreparable damage to the brand has not turned things around. In fact, P&G can’t even say it.
Yes, we drank the Kool-Aid® and embraced the post-modern narrative, and got razor-burned badly. But we’re so afraid of them that we can’t even suggest that Gillette’s problems are a product of a bad ad campaign that pissed off the customer base.
If things don’t settle down or take a turn, Gillette might have to go on the chopping block, sold off to someone else who, hopefully, has the sense to realize that a company whose life-blood for the past 120 years has been men’s faces can manage to promote the product without slapping them in the face.
