Is Unilever a hypocrite or just doing good brand marketing as usual? Here’s the controversy: Dove’s successful “Campaign for Real Beauty” introduced a video called “Onslaught” this fall educating girls on a wider definition of beauty, warning of the onslaught of typical beauty industry messages about what makes a beautiful woman (plastic surgery, bulimia, etc.), and advising parents to “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”
At the same time AXE, another Unilever brand, introduced some videos that depict women in just the opposite way — sex-crazed, busty, near-naked Amazons.Then comes this Dove-AXE mash-up spoof video, with the line ” Talk to your daughter before Unilever does.”
Since then there has been a blizzard of media articles, like this Op-Ed in the Boston Globe, “A company’s ugly contradiction” by Michelle Gillett.
“But the launching of “Onslaught,” the most recent of Unilever’s efforts to foster self-esteem, has also launched a controversy about the sincerity of its commitment to “real beauty.” …Viewers are struggling to make sense of how Dove can promise to educate girls on a wider definition of beauty while other Unilever ads exhort boys to make “nice girls naughty” and assure them, “the more you spray, the more you get” in the Axe deodorant body spray ads.”
Business school marketing courses taught us to create brands that connect with the target audience’s values and appeal to them emotionally, which both Dove and Axe seem to be doing superbly well, especially when you look at the revenue and market share growth of these two brands over the past few years.
In this new world of transparency, do branding “best practices” need to be rewritten? Instead of “connecting” with artificially constructed brands, do people want to connect with companies whose values and causes they identify with? Do people want “relationships” with brands or with the companies and people behind the brands?
I think the Unilever controversy shows that people want to buy from companies they like and identify with, not brands. A new marketing mash-up is in the making — branding and corporate reputation. The new stars won’t be the ad agencies, but the company’s leadership team.
