Tag: Dove

  • Brands, Activism & Morality

    A while back, someone had joked on Twitter that by 2025, babies will be born outraged. But in 2020, the joke, at least in Indian advertising, is that when the Tanishq brand manager begins to think of a campaign, #BoycottTanishq starts trending. When I was writing the article on brands and empathy for Business Insider, I realised it would need a lot of effort for brands to go beyond signalling.

    However, with inequities becoming even more of a pressing topic, and the expectation from brands to be active participants in society – activism to action, is there an inevitable movement that we will see? And hence, this post on brands through the prism of activism and morality, from the perspectives of a consumer and a brand marketer, and the safety of an armchair.

    “We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.”

    Clay Routledge
    (more…)

  • Provoke the Woke?

    Originally published in afaqs

    “In these unprecedented times”, brands have been making many efforts to stay relevant by inserting themselves into cultural narratives, but it isn’t that easy. In fact, they are increasingly realising that their plans might actually backfire when they provoke the ‘woke’.

    Woke versus Broke

    Nike’s path-breaking campaign in 2018, featuring (American football quarterback) Colin Kaepernick, is now a case study for brands taking a stance on matters of societal relevance. But it also had a relatively lesser-known second order consequence. In 2019, Nike was forced to take sides in the Hong Kong protests.

    When Daryl Morey, general manager, Houston Rockets (a professional basketball team in the US), tweeted his support for the protesters, China gave the National Basketball Association (NBA) a cold stare. The NBA apologised, and Nike gave an assist by pulling its Houston Rockets merchandise from five stores in Beijing and Shanghai.

    It didn’t just end there. Courtesy LeBron James (professional basketball player), with whom Nike has an association worth north of $1 billion. James’s response was that Morey was misinformed, and that “We do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative things that come with that, too. I don’t think every issue should be everybody’s problem.”

    Nike took a stance, by staying silent. But having taken an unflinching stance in the US on a ‘freedom of expression’ issue, Nike’s response to China reflected poorly on the brand. Unsurprisingly, they got called out by quite a few commentators. Nike had its reasons. Its China business was worth $6 billion, having doubled in five years, even as the US sales remained flat.

    All the world’s staged

    In ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’, Erving Goffman uses the metaphor of a theatre to describe human interactions. Backstage is where “the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking in his lines, and step out of character.” On stage, though, there is a performance to be delivered. These days, thanks to the proliferation of social platforms, the ‘backstage’ is shrinking. We’re always ‘on show’ for some audience – on Instagram/Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter, and yes, TikTok.

    The same goes for brands as well. Advertising, PR communication, social media content, all ‘performances’ are not just watched, but connected, too, with everything that is known about the brand. Every expression is an impression. Goffman emphasises that the audience is also a part of the performance, and without their tacit agreement, the show would fall apart. Taken together, this means that the option to be selectively woke is disappearing.

    Moments of truth

    Back in 2017, a three-second body wash ad on Facebook, which featured a Black woman turning into a White woman, almost cost Dove years of ‘real beauty’ work. It managed to redeem itself by making some smart moves, both tactically and strategically. Things have become more difficult these days. Because ironically, we are all even more touchy in the era of social distancing! And bad news travels faster. All it takes is one status update.

    Even as (Amazon’s) Jeff Bezos drew applause for “And Dave, you’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose”, there were questions being asked about the use of Amazon’s tech by police for racial profiling. While resolving that, the company got called out for treatment of workers. It’s not just Amazon. When brands like Uber, Apple, Adidas, etc., take a stance on racism, they are being questioned on the lack of diversity in workforce and leadership. Google and Facebook are even facing employee activism.

    Closer home, #BlackLivesMatter, and celebrities endorsing fairness creams make for an interesting Venn diagram. And, it’s not just celebrities. In the name of ‘Moment Marketing’, many brands have seen their woke moments in the sun rapidly become sunstrokes!

    Don’t get me wrong, this is not to say that brands shouldn’t make topical and relevant narratives a part of their messaging strategy. But in an increasingly polarised world, communication is a full contact sport.

    Dave or Dove, the message is clear, brand communication is no longer a skin-deep game, it is about having skin in the game. As consumers move upwards in the hierarchy of needs, their expectation from brands is moving down – in a direction that’s familiar to marketers. Rather than just creating awareness and interest on things that matter, consumers desire action from brands!

  • A new brand narrative

    Dove’s immensely viewed ‘Real Beauty’ video has sparked a parody and many debates including how the content would (or would not) help sales. But what it actually reminded me of was a quote attributed to Marty Neumeier (via)

    Brand isn’t what you say about your product, it’s what other people say about your product.

    A little reminder that the marketer’s best attempts at defining the user’s perceptions have a chance of failing, especially in the era when everyone is a publisher. Sometime back, I’d read a post on Smashing Magazine which argued that the traditional way of brand building – repetition and consistency – applicable in a time when media options were limited, needs to give way to a playful, adaptive brand that is flexible while keeping intact the core principles. (Oreo is one of the better examples here) It defines the brand as an ecosystem of interactions that embraces different platforms, co-creation with customers and proposes a very interesting method to achieve this – apply the concept of ‘minimum viable product‘ to brand design.

    On another front, it was heartening to read that at least some feel that venture capital needs to get serious about brand thinking. Though not in so many words, this post is also in alignment with the concept of brand as an ecosystem and gives several good examples of brands earning the trust of users as well as going beyond their products and services in the positioning. This post uses the phrase ‘Clean Slate Brands‘ to describe new, unknown brands who are using better products/services, radical transparency and ‘open operations’ to compete with, and beat more ‘revered’ brands. (follow the link for examples)

    But what happens to established brands? How do they redefine themselves to be relevant in this changing scenario? This led me to think about Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. Do you think that the traditional form of brand building and communication focused on the bottom 2 sections – Physiological, Safety? As products and services become more efficient courtesy technological advances, and functionality becomes a given as opposed to a value proposition, should brand design as a science (and brands that have thus far used the traditional method) realign to focus on the top 3 sections – Love/Belonging, Esteem, and Self Actualisation? Think about the cola giants – from thirst to happiness (Coke) and Empathy (Pepsi Refresh) is that what they have been doing?

    until next time, a brand’s new story 🙂

  • Hairsay

    So, the Old Spice man  increased the sales of the product. Now we can renew the debate on the efficacy of social media on the bottom line. We obviously won’t ask for correlation data. 🙂 The other side effect is that every brand manager will now want to replicate it – especially the viral and the ROI. Quite like a poster child (in India) of an era gone by – Sunsilk’s GangofGirls, which at that point had made many a  brand manager experimenting with digital media tell their agency “I want one too”. Damn virals work at meta levels!!

    I recently read Kapil Ohri’s article on afaqs, on the site’s makeover – the shift from blogs and gangs to trends and forums and the ‘mandatory’ buttons – Facebook and Twitter. Its early days, so it’d be unfair to make a comment on the numbers, even if they were to be considered a parameter of success/ failure. But while, on buttons, I think YouTube videos would’ve been a help. More on that in a bit. A revamped GoG, and the Pantene vs Dove war for hairspace being fought offline and on blogs (Karthik, L Bhat) gives me enough food for thought.. and opinion.

    Sunsilk Gang of Girls: GoG could have (like an industry person commented on the afaqs post) integrated Facebook in a much better way. Check out what Levi’s has done at their online store. Instead of separate registrations and profile, Facebook’s plugins could make life easier for the user and automatically bring in the ‘gangs’. It could get them to pull their own photos from Facebook for the ‘Makeover Machine’, suggest it to friends, and so on. Or build a Twitter app that uses the display picture. It could have perhaps thought bigger and had their ambassador (Priyanka Chopra?) interact with the users through her own identities on these platforms. Or used a location based tool like Foursquare (or FB Pages or later Google Places) to start building a resource for salons and tips at each place (think of a Burrp! for salons), maybe in sync with a YouTube channel for tips.

    Pantene: Good Morning! They obviously missed a little thing when they didn’t pay attention to the pwnage of DNA at the hands of the Times Group during the former’s launch campaign in Mumbai back in 2005 (?), or the more recent Airtel- Reliance DTH fun. Not to mention the cliche that after a certain point, the only person who gets teased is the brand manager. Ok, I won’t overstate, but c’mon this is a real-time era AND they did walk into a Dovetailed ambush. Since the internet already has made them un-mysterious (thanks for that info, Karthik), maybe Pantene should have just added those FB page and Twitter links to their mass media communication, and solved the mystery immediately online. Mind you, thanks to our dismal internet penetration, they could still demystify it again on mass media, later, after perhaps, adding the content from their online and offline activities. (think non market research agency 80%) That way, there would’ve been at least some buffer against a Dove’s sneak attack. Arguable, but possible.

    Dove: All of us should take the time and remember the controversy over the ‘campaign for real beauty’. But hey, they saw an opportunity and used it. Effects on long term goals are again arguable.

    A little note on ‘low involvement’. I wrote about brands, content and new media platforms in the last post, in the context of the Old Spice campaign, and also mentioned the importance of ‘intent’ and setting objectives. Once the ‘why’ is done, the relevant crowd can be identified, along with the platforms and activation strategies – ‘(to) who’, where and what. (Read Rohit Awasthi’s comment on Karthik’s first post) When the ‘right’ content is pitched to the ‘right’ people at the ‘right’ time (and the ‘right’ platform too), very few categories are low involvement.  (read Naina’s comment on that post) And that’s the beauty of the web in general, and the tools that social media have provided marketers. Old Spice could be seen as low involvement too, until they did this campaign.

    But having mostly seen communication as advertising (except arguably PR), creating content for social platforms is in itself quite a challenge for brand managers. Even if they were to  view ‘social’ as ‘media’, it requires a complete realignment of how media and content strategy is done, mostly because the mechanics of distribution are completely different. At a fundamental level, brands are dependent on users of platforms to create a buzz, and money doesn’t always work. At this point, tools can help with the ‘time’ (including location and other contexts) and ‘people’ (interest), and the way it works, if the ‘content’ is done right, people will get other people.

    Therefore brand managers need to make a more diligent effort. The fragmentation of traditional media does not seem to have made much of an impact on the costs involved in using them as distribution channels. So when ‘social media’  presents ‘free’ channels, brand managers see a value proposition and jump right in with a TVC and or/other weapons of mass mediocrity. Brands, I believe, need to invest a bit more on who they’re trying to reach, and then invest some more on building content and designing networks and constructs (irrespective of platform) that will drive the crowd to interact with the content and share it more. Content and people that will drive more connections, and help meet everyone’s objectives.

    But yes, until Augmented Reality allows me to scan a shampoo and tell me how many of my friends liked it, and think I should use it, (though my hair won’t last that long 😐 ) lets keep playing all the shampoo games we can play. 🙂 And while on using social platforms purely with a sales objective, I’m reminded of how Grandma uses her laptop. (vid below) Can it be used for those purposes? Of course! But is that its best case use? We can argue 😉

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg6emajJmEo

    until next time, sometimes brand strategies can be real poo!!

  • Social Media – beyond strategy

    Unilever CMO Simon Clift, at Ad Age’s Digital Conference, spoke about the increasing role of social media in brand management, and said that the internet allows consumers to hijack conversations inspite of the huge money spent on advertising. From Unilever’s experience with Dove also comes the understanding that its not just the communicated parts of a brand that comes under scrutiny, but also the corporate’s entire set of credos – sweatshops, impact on environment are a few things he mentioned. Unilever has prominent corporate signatures in its advertising in UK. He also spoke about the increasing penetration of mobiles, of “marketing program with social benefits”, and a product centric approach.

    In essence, it reiterates the decline of one way communication, consumer participation, of brands being ‘deeper’ than the marketing that is done for them. But it was good to hear it from a leading FMCG corporate. The most interesting part of the article for me, however, was this, from the author of the post

    Social media is not a strategy. You need to understand it, and you’ll need to deploy it as a tactic. But remember that the social graph just makes it even more important that you have a good product. Put another way: The volume and quality of your earned media will be directly proportional to the impact and quality of your product and ideas.

    I think that nails it. All this while I was considering social media as strategy. Now I think its more than that – its something that will make the organisation really focus on what they’re delivering to their consumers, how they are doing it – not just from a delivery platform/operations pov, but also from how socially and environmentally conscious and responsible they have been. In Mr.Clift’s words “enlightened self interest”. The ways and means of communication – brand advertising, promotions, PR etc, will follow much later.

    Meanwhile, the Marketing Pilgrim asks an interesting question – does social media really have the pulse of the people? It cites the Johnson & Johnson Motrin ads that had raised the hackles of mom bloggers a while ago, and caused them to remove the ad. Apparently a research was done later that threw up some interesting stats – 90% of women had never seen the ad, and when they did see it, 45% liked it. It also speaks of the Skittles – Twitter experiment, and a research in which only 6% of 300 people sampled had heard about it. Those on Twitter would’ve heard about both these, but the Pilgrim asks whether these voices resemble those outside at all, and how much of influence do they have outside.

    I, for one, still think social media is a good microcosm of the real world. It does give varied perspectives, and the key is in evaluating the perspectives, digging further where required, and deciding on a course of action that fits larger objectives, and not knee jerk reactions. Wonder if there would have been different results if J&J and Skittles had attempted to carry the community along in their efforts.

    But the bigger opportunity, I have always felt is that it allows brands to experiment with segmentation. On one hand, the net allows extremely targeted communication to a core segment, and on the other hand, cheaper distribution allows the brand to also communicate with different segments of the long tail of consumers. It means that brands can play different roles according to the consumer’s interests, and varying with the context, by tweaking its communication, even while sticking to its core objectives. There are new monitoring tools being developed that will aid of this.

    Most importantly, it allows brands to find evangelists in each segment and work with them to improve and communicate. Consumers who find a product interesting and appealing will communicate it on their own, adding their perspective and giving a human touch of ‘interestingness’. I’m increasingly seeing posts about marketing ideas that have differed from the norm – Penguin India’s ‘Blog a Penguin India Classic’, which I wouldn’t know about if Karthik didn’t mention it on Twitter or his blog (though I do think they could’ve done it better by using social reading lists like Visual Bookshelf – on Facebook as an app too, Shelfari etc to reach Penguin readers – can easily find that through book titles), product placement ideas for Nestle evolving from the “Mad Men” on Twitter. Cisco’s comic book experiments via Chris Brogan’s post (Webex in Marvel Comics), and Kara Swisher on All Things Digital ( The Realm, an entire comic series). All appealed to me as a marketer, and one as a bibliophile too. Social media is not one thing – the channels vary in audience, kinds of interaction etc – Facebook, Twitter, You Tube all allow new ideas ( I thought Volvo’s Twitter stream inside a YouTube banner ad was very interesting) and fresh engagement rules, and ways to break advertising and brand communication stereotypes.

    I wonder about the role of strategy in a social media landscape where many things are still unfamiliar. The standards, processes and even objectives are in most cases, hazy, and evolution is happening on a regular basis. In such a scenario, perhaps organisations should first take a long look at themselves and their customers – current and potential, and start by setting goals that go beyond social media.

    until next time, lab time

    Bonus Reads: Social Media tools popular among marketers (via Digital Inspiration)