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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Men_Can_Be

"The Best Men Can Be" was a corporate social responsibility advertising campaign from the safety razor and personal care brand Gillette of Procter & Gamble. The campaign launched on January 13, 2019, with the digital release of a short film entitled We Believe: The Best Men Can Be, which played upon the previous slogan ("The Best a Man Can Get") to address negative behavior among men, including bullying, sexism, sexual misconduct, and toxic masculinity. The campaign includes a three-year commitment by Gillette to make donations to organizations that "[help men] achieve their personal best".[1]

The initial short film was the subject of controversy. While it was praised by some, such as Bernice King, and defended by others, such as Mona Charen, it was generally received negatively by various online commentators, particularly males and conservatives, becoming one of the most disliked videos on YouTube.

Wish I could find the ad itself. Gillette appears to have scrubbed it. It was pretty offensive to men, if I remember.

Here it is from Gillette's official account: https://youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

Thanks. I wonder why this wasn't the first result when I searched Google? It's getting harder and harder to find things these days.

Google search is almost entirely SEO blogspam for me in the last year. I've started using Yandex.

It was pretty offensive to men, if I remember.

It was, and I swore off Gillette for life as a result. Doesn't really matter since P&G owns so much.

There's value in changing brands as a result of controversy, even if the company getting your money remains the same.

If Gillette sales suddenly dip by 50% and Braun picks up those sales, even if P&G ends up with the same number of sales, there are a bunch of factories that are going to be retooled or closed, a bunch of people that are going to be hired and fired or moved to different divisions that may have offices in different areas. Those are costs, and those are visible events among the executives of the company. To say nothing of the cost of running the ad in the first place: while marketing has some issues with showing its actual effects, the underlying theory is you increase your sales.

Yes, it's technically possible for them to just repeatedly bait and switch you: once you're established with Braun they do something exactly as controversial. But what then? You're not going back to Gillette. Maybe there's a third P&G brand that makes razors that you go to, but sooner or later you'll move outside P&G's ecosystem for your razor, unless they're spending even more money to set up new brands as fast as they collapse. Maybe you still buy their shampoo, but it's not like there's a binary "yes they're our customer/no they're not our customer" thing here where once you buy one P&G product they've won. They want your shampoo money and your razor money and your lotion money and every other bit of money they can get from you, and insofar as you move away from that that's a failure of their profit-seeking goals.

It probably won't bankrupt them as a company, but that's probably an unrealistic goal in the first place. What it will do is send a clear signal "hey, doing this thing that you thought would make you money is instead costing you money", and that's both attainable and effective for changing behavior.

I also permanently switched away from Gillette. It was a pretty easy choice since I'm also saving a lot of money. I'm sure I still consume a ton of P&G products though.

My guess is that that was seen as less important, because the people who use a product are not necessarily the same as the people who buy a product. This is most evident in marketing to children, but even for adults, there are a lot of households where the wife does the grocery shopping. Thus sometimes you get ads for men's products that are targeted at women - the Old Spice commercial is probably the most famous example.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gillette's theory was that it's an ad for women, who buy shaving cream for their husbands or male relatives.

I've long that that they realized they had lost their king of the shaving market position to cheap Chinese razors (like dollar shave club) and their best bet was to lock up a smaller but hopefully loyal core of customers.

Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.

Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.

The razor wars are so confusing to me because I'm out of touch in the other direction. I'm 0% price sensitive on razors, I bought a pack of Gillette refills like maybe two years ago? I don't get much facial hair, and my hair is very soft and fine, so I can use the same cartridge for months at a time. I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive? I spend like $40 every 3 years.

I assume that for someone with more/thicker/coarser facial hair it's a different animal.

I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive?

You don't until you do. I only started using a safety razor as opposed to disposable for body hair cause I randomly saw a suggestion that it'd be cheaper in the long run. It was a negligible amount of money in the short run yet/so I still tried it out.

Now it's my go-to.

deleted

You can see it here. (It's kind of weird that the Guardian has a video which is just Gillette's video, but it has 4.4 million views, so they're probably making some money off of it)

Did this ad come out before or after YouTube hid dislikes? Any way to see the ratio on the original ad?

Youtube started hiding dislikes in November of 2021, so this was before. There are plugins that will let you see the dislikes on a video, since they're only hidden, but are still there.

Thanks for the tip.

Nowhere near as skewed as I was expecting, although this isn't the original ad.

Watched it again. What a trainwreck. Can you even imagine the shit storm that a gender-flipped version of this would launch?

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