By Isaiah O’Connor

Jason St. Clair the founder of Atheoz recently wrote a blog, about how Nike masterfully used “Wokeness” to drive sales up. Now I think this worked well for many reasons, with one of the main ones being the way they let it play out. They picked a shoe design that was something that only a small but vocal amount of people would find controversial. They then recalled the shoe based on the input of one controversial person sparking the very well planned controversy.  They did not appear to be setting out to make a statement, just release a shoe with an American Flag on independence day, something that would likely be seen as doing something simply patriotic, not controversial.

As for  Gillette, they set out to be openly controversial as they were losing market share. They launched the now-infamous “woke” commercial  “We Believe”. At first, it worked, as the controversy put them back into the public’s eye. However, the old idiom “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” proved to be false.

 On July 30th Gilette's parent company P&G  had to write down the company by 8 Billion, Billion with a B dollars. Gillette lost 5 Billion dollars since the ad dropped. Sure the ad garnered a lot of attention. But with 1.5million dislikes, the attention was mostly negative.

Now the official story is that the loss was due to men not shaving as much anymore, and other competitors eating away their market share.  They denied that the controversial ad campaign had anything to do with the loss. However, they seem to have seen the error of their ways. On the 23rd of August 2019, Manu Airan, associate brand director for Gillette Australia and New Zealand Stated

“Shifting the spotlight from social issues to local heroes” like firefighters and personal trainers is the company’s new focus.”

So what went wrong? In a nutshell, the controversy they started offended a very large portion of their target audience, that is to say, men. They made many mistakes along the way.

The first misstep is that they hired a feminist with a strong anti-male bias to create a commercial targeted towards men. If you are going to market a product, it is not wise to hire someone that may have a strong dislike or even a hatred of your core market. This would be akin to hiring PETA  to do a commercial for Mc Donald’s.

Second, the commercial came across as preachy telling men how they should live their lives. Yes, you should have a call to action, such as; Buy Now, Visit Us, Subscribe, etc, but you should not be telling how to live their lives. Do this and you risk offending even people that may have supported your message

And lastly, they did not mention their product even once. This may be an okay strategy, depending on how you do it. As I mentioned in my blog about not marketing your product or service, you need to market the emotion of the product. Gillette did not do this. Instead, the emotions they created were focused on the company, and to a large part were more negative than positive. This negativity caused a lot more harm than good to an already struggling company. 

Some things to consider if you want to use controversy in marketing. Could the controversy you are going for possibly alienate your core market? Would it bring attention to the product or service you offer, or will it change the focus to you or your companies behavior?  Is it even wise to stir up controversy in the first place? 

From what I have seen, bad publicity, which can be good is generally the most useful for a person who is in the public eye. What do I mean by that? If you are, an entertainer, a YouTuber, a Podcaster, etc, then you will get more eyes on you and thus increase your profile, and be more successful.  If you are selling a product or a service, it may not be wise to stir up controversy, however, there are exceptions. 

 In summary, controversy can be a helpful, but dangerous, marketing tool. Done properly it can create a lot of growth for your business, done wrong it can cause you a massive decline, if not the total loss of your business.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Entrepreneur
Isaiah O’Connor CBDO Atheoz.com

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