And Get Back Doing Their Real Job —Marketing Their Goods And Services To Their Customers.
You have to go back a long time historically to replicate a similar truly cataclysmic worldwide marketing blunder. It was Tuesday, April 23rd, 1985—a day that will live in marketing infamy and that spawned consumer angst the likes of which no business has ever seen. The Coke monolith broke all the rules and arrogantly dissed its loyal consumer base by introducing New Coke. Production of the original formulation ended later that week. They paid the ultimate of sales plummeting and consumer backlash all because they didn’t listen to their market place.
Well history has shown what a huge blunder that was.
But, stand by . . .… you ain’t seen nothing yet!
The arrogant, out- of- touch, brain-dead marketers preoccupied with social engineering rather than product positioning and sales have again reared their ugly heads. But this time, it isn’t the world’s largest beverage company; instead, it is now the world’s largest FMCG corporation’s turn — Proctor & Gamble (P&G) — through its iconic market-leading brand Gillette.
For the past 30 years, Gillette had been — “The Best A Man Can Get”.— an iconic market-leading positioning!
However, in 2019, the marketers at “world shaving headquarters” (yes, you read it correctly, that’s what they call themselves) decided the campaign needed to be revitalised, revived, renovated, and refaced.
So now, in a seemingly innocuous shift, the slogan has become: “The Best a Man Can Be.” Yet, let’s not be fooled by this simple change.
Thirty years ago, Gillette’s 1989 shaver positioning and corporate message was a celebration of masculinity. The ad was full of iconic images of pride: fathers hugging their children, and men as corporate stars, winning athletes, devoted husbands, and fun-loving friends. “We know how to make the best of who you are,” boasted the proud commentary over the backdrop of a heroic anthem track.
However, the latest dark, accusatory Gillette advertisement launched recently speaks to the great achievement of third-wave feminism in trashing the male brand. The ad shows scene after scene of so-called “toxic masculinity”—men treating women with disdain, nasty aggressive boys, and brutish men.
The virtue-signalling campaign from Gillette singles out praise for only the few men it claims are willing to teach most men to behave. It captures the zeitgeist in the most shocking fashion.
It’s an appalling effort at social engineering to put it mildly.
The Gillette executives earn their living feeding off what it means to be male. And now, they decide to attack their customer base, to announce to the world that everything about masculinity is bad, dangerous, and deficient. A 30-year iconic market-leading positioning strategy has been just been bastardised and neutered.
In a major development it was reported between late July and early August, when it was announced that Gillette had lost $5 billion in quarterly sales, resulting in P&G giving Gillette an $8 billion non-cash write-down in terms of valuation.
Within hours of the commercial’s airing, it was immediately confronted by criticism in the form of an influx of disparaging rhetoric, memes, and comment sections. As of December 2019, the commercial had been “disliked” on YouTube over 1.56 million times, joining the ranks of various popular music videos and episodes of YouTube Rewind as one of the most “disliked” videos in the history of the platform. But as of December 2021, it had fallen out of the top 50.
One look at the feedback at the time of its release could easily lead one into assuming Gillette was perhaps embroiled in scandal.
Gillette was accused of everything including misandry, political propaganda, hypocrisy, virtue signalling, and belittling its own customers. The furore on platforms including YouTube became so volatile that Gillette has disabled its own comments section ever since. For example, British journalist and television personality Piers Morgan accused Gillette of being part of a supposed “pathetic global assault on masculinity,” while controversial right-wing political commentator Tomi Lahren claimed on Twitter, “The only people applauding @Gillette are social justice warriors”.
While it certainly wasn’t a good look — and one led to the original critics of “We Believe” having an opportunity to taunt and snicker — PR was quick to respond. P&G claimed that the ad was not to blame, instead pointing the finger at the aforementioned market competition and fluctuating social norms.
Corporations acting on social engineering have become a plague on our modern society.
Surly they should be bright enough to see the writing that is on the wall for those who seek to mould social concisions.
In a report released this past week Multimillion-dollar donations from Australia’s big banks, supermarkets, mining giants and rich philanthropists failed to influence the Voice to Parliament referendum, as new figures show the Yes campaign lost the vote despite spending more than double the No side.
In the seven months leading up to the October 2023 referendum, which was defeated 60-40 nationally, more than $92 million was poured into advertising, social media, signage and other campaign resources by the Yes and No camps, according to financial data released by the Australian Electoral Commission on Tuesday.
At least $62m was spent by Yes-aligned organisations, unions, and political parties, including a staggering $43.82m by Australians for Constitutional Change, the main fundraising arm of the pro-Voice group Yes23.
Major corporate donations to the Yes campaign included $2m each from ANZ, Westpac, Commonwealth Bank, Woodside Energy, BHP, Rio Tinto and Coles’ parent company Wesfarmers, while Woolworths gave $1.56m, NAB $1.3m and Telstra $1m. QANTAS flew many yes advocates across the Nation as their contribution to this horrific national waste of money.
Combined, the two main No groups – Australians for Unity and Advance Australia – spent $22.2m campaigning against the referendum. Of this, $10.4m was spent by Advance.
The biggest donors to Australians for Unity, which was lead by NT Senator Jacinta Nampajinpa Price and Indigenous advocate Warren Mundine, were Silver River Investment Holdings ATF Fenwick Family Trust, Riley Street Car Park, Harbig Properties and Simon Fenwick, who all gave about $250,000 each.
The biggest single donor in the referendum was the philanthropic Paul Ramsay Foundation, which pumped $7.01m into the Yes side, while the second largest contributor was the Givia trust, established by MYOB founder Craig Winkler, which gave $4.5m to the Yes-aligned Uluru Dialogue based at the University of NSW.
The Uluru Dialogue chaired by Indigenous advocate Professor Megan Davis, reported receiving $11.1m in donations, of which it spent $10.3m over the course of the campaign.
Wealthy individuals also sought to make their mark on the referendum, with billionaire Anthony Pratt tipping $1m into the Yes campaign.
Ms Price, the Coalition’s Indigenous Australians spokeswoman, said the AEC figures showed the Voice was a “priority of the elites, activists and corporations”.
“Despite the Yes campaign outspending the No campaign more than two to one, Australians recognised the Voice for what it was: Albanese’s voice of division,” she said.
“Today’s report should send a clear message particularly to those larger corporations – they should focus on providing for their customers, not telling them what to think.”
Mining magnate Clive Palmer spent $1.9m on his own anti-Voice campaign, while activist group GetUp spent almost $1.4m backing Yes.
Various branches of the Liberals and Nationals spent more than $2.8m collectively on the No case, while Labor branches spent more than $930,000 on the Yes campaign, which was further bolstered by more than $3.3m from various unions, including $1m from the federal Australian Education Union alone.
Are they so naive as to believe that this was the most important issue in the nation at that time? Or were they hoodwinked and swept along by a populist, extremely vocal, inner-city minority, starving for a cause and fuelled by the leftist lobby that runs the ABC and certain sections of the media these days?
In the majority of homes in the western suburbs of Sydney, where people are struggling to pay their ever-increasing electricity bills, grocery bills, school fees, rent or mortgages, I strongly doubt this was a subject that occupied much of their time around the kitchen table of a morning. Maybe I’m wrong?
But politically correct virtue-signalling is now baked into the key performance indicators of most big companies thanks to bloated HR departments with nothing useful to do and perhaps some sort of misguided guilt complex among their privileged senior management.
Now, thank goodness, the Centre for Independent Studies has aimed its lasers at the worst excesses of what is more politely known as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with a paper by research fellow Dr Jeremy Sammut released just recently. “Curbing Corporate Social Responsibility: Preserving Pluralism—and Preventing Politicisation—in Australian Business” finds that corporate meddling in contentious political debates is in danger of becoming entrenched in law.
Sammut writes of the push for the Australian Stock Exchange’s proposed corporate governance guidelines to require companies to earn a so-called “social licence” by being “socially responsible” on politically contentious issues, such as human rights, climate change, taxation, and wages.
“Corporate meddling in political issues that have only tenuous—if any—links to business interests is the line that CSR should not cross, if it is to avoid companies becoming inappropriately politicised. CSR activists want nothing less than a licence to play politics with shareholders’ money,” Dr Sammut writes.
They want to “subvert companies from traditional business towards open political activism. This is revealed by the activist mindset of CSR professionals who assert that the next stage involves business’s ‘role in society as a driver of change’ and enabling companies to participate in driving ‘systemic change’ around social, environmental and economic issues,” Dr Sammut said.
Dr Jeremy Sammut
Dr Sammut adds that “On this understanding of the ultimate focus of CSR, the business of business will not just be CSR in the best interests of the business—the business of business will be politics.”
He argues for a new principle to be “introduced into the language and practice of good corporate governance: the Community Pluralism Principle, which would ensure that shareholders aren’t neglected and social activism doesn’t take precedence over the company’s core business mission.”
The overwhelming message to business should be to stay in the boardroom and out of the bedroom. Businesses are not elected. They are not there to make up community values or set social standards or agendas. They exist to represent their shareholders and sell their products. It goes without saying that businesses must be good corporate citizens. Paying their fair share of corporate tax (e.g. Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon) would be a good place to start, rather than shifting earnings from Australia to some far-flung tax haven. Oh no! Paying tax isn’t part of a “social licence” or being “socially responsible.”
Far too often, we’ve seen the so-called moral compass set by businesses to be self-serving and opportunistic. Get back to making your widgets or whatever it is you make, and leave the moral fibre of the community to those who have no profit to make out of it.
