Blowback on Gillette’s “The Best Men Can Be” campaign against toxic masculinity, and there has been a lot, falls into two general camps: 1. Don’t you lecture me, Gillette (I’ve seen this from people across the political spectrum, albeit more stridently from the right); 2. Gillette, this ain’t gonna make Dollar Shave Club go away.
These are both true, but they miss two bigger and related points: standing and contribution.
Standing is a legal notion that says you must have some connection to a situation in order to bring a lawsuit about that situation. I cannot sue the Federal Government for seizing private property along the Texas/Mexico border to build a wall because I don’t own property in Texas. I have no standing.
Gillette has no standing when it comes to the very real problem of toxic masculinity. It may be nice that one section of multi-billion-dollar Procter and Gamble thinks that toxic masculinity is a bad thing, but toxic masculinity has no connection to whether or not a man is clean shaven. If all abusers wore beards, then Gillette might argue that their razors could do something about toxic masculinity. However, to the relief of hipsters everywhere, there is neither correlation nor causation between beards and toxic masculinity.
Gillette, to use Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s language, has no skin in the game when it comes to toxic masculinity. The company’s opinion does not change anything, and Gillette is not changing anything about itself in order to have that opinion.
If Gillette had built its brand by portraying macho guys treating women poorly and modeling that behavior for little boys, then a departure from that brand image might be meaningful. However, Gillette’s ads have typically featured attractive, athletic men doing attractive athletic things while women look on with loving expressions. Superficial? Maybe. Toxic? Nah.
As a point of comparison, I disagree with Jenny McCarthy’s position that vaccines caused her son’s autism. But whether she is right or wrong (she’s wrong), Miss McCarthy has standing on the issue because her son is on the autism spectrum. I have no standing because I don’t have children on the spectrum nor do I work with people who have autism. The only possible social value my opinion on this issue might have is if I convince young parents who might think I’m a bright guy to vaccinate their babies, which is unlikely.
People or organizations with no standing on a situation can acquire standing through investment. If I believe that it’s important for eighth graders to learn about Shakespeare, then I can volunteer in an eighth grade classroom and try to inspire them to go see a play. I then have standing because of my investment of time. (This is not a hypothetical example; thank heavens I have things to say about “As You Like It.”)
Contribution: This is the second problem with Gillette’s campaign: their financial contribution simply is not big enough to buy them standing. Gillette has promised to contribute one million dollars per year for three years to organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. It’s nice, but it does not represent a real investment by P&G.
To pencil this out: at the time I’m writing this P&G’s market cap is $230B, and its fiscal 2018 revenues were $67B. If I estimate on the high side that P&G paid Gray $5M for the two minute film and website, then so far the company has committed $6M to this project in 2019. That is roughly one percent of one percent of P&G’s 2018 revenue, and it’s less than one quarter of one percent of P&G’s market cap.
This is not impressive.
At best “The Best Men Can Be” is an antiquated form of brand posturing where the brand makes a statement then–ta da!–quickly shows the product in the hope that the viewer will infer a connection between Coca-Cola and happiness, Toyota and a feeling, Miller Beer and having a lot of attractive friends. Anthropologists call this “sympathetic magic.”
At worst this is a big corporation trying to siphon some of the energy off an important, grassroots social phenomenon, #MeToo, that has done positive work in the world in order to sell razors and shaving cream. Some people call this “sickening.”
Gillette could still do real things to help the #MeToo cause and combat toxic masculinity. It could allocate its media dollars towards programming that represents and supports appropriate male behavior, even if that means sacrificing moments when its ads can reach the right audience watching the wrong show. That’s skin in the game.
Gillette could create a matching campaign with a price tag a lot higher than $3M where for every used razor blade mailed to Cincinnati it would donate $1.25 (roughly half the retail cost of a Gillette razor) to battered women’s shelters. (The recycling would be a nice bonus.)
Gillette could create an online platform, “The Gillette Wake-Up Call,” where people could anonymously send a Gillette razor to a man who needs to change his behavior. The razor wouldn’t be free, but Gillette would protect the identity of the sender and send a message along with the razor. Perhaps, “it’s time to shave off some of your bad behavior.”
If Tom’s Shoes can donate one pair of shoes to a poor person for ever pair it sells to a not-poor person, then surely Gillette can do better than one percent of one percent.
It’s time for a new campaign: The Best Gillette Can Be.
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