Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

How will Hoseasons enforce its ban on ‘homophobes’?

Gillette has learned the hard way that if you annoy your customer base, your business will suffer. Ever since it released its woke men-bashing ad earlier this year, its sales have slumped. Who’d have thought it? Telling men they’re disgusting bullies and sexual harassers — as Gillette’s ad did — will not endear you to men! Blokes walked away from Gillette. They stopped buying its razors. Turns out that calling your customers scum isn’t a good idea.

The ad was a transparent and nauseating attempt to win brownie points with the Twitterati and other woke folk in the #MeToo era. Out went the square-jawed studs of Gillette’s 1980s adverts, stroking their hairless chins as the jingle said ‘The best a man can get’, and in came troubled and abusive blokes behaving very badly. The ad’s narrator drones on about toxic masculinity and sexism as men are shown bullying each other and speaking over women. The ad could be whittled down to the slogan: ‘You are a dreadful person. Buy our product!’

Sales collapsed. As Marketing Week put it, ‘Gillette brand takes a hit’. There are various reasons for Gillette’s sales woes. Hip young men are growing beards and therefore have no need of razors. New razor rivals have arrived on the scene. But the spectacularly ill-thought-out ad definitely had an impact too. And so Gillette is changing tack. It’s going back to celebrating men as heroes rather than berating them as moronic sexist basket cases who probably need therapy more than they need a four-blade razor.

It says it is ‘shifting the spotlight from social issues to local heroes’. Gillette Australia has launched an ad featuring a firefighter and personal trainer. It says it wants to go back to ‘representing men at their best’.

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