Today we start a new year in a more resolute age. People want to change the world, even when a shave is as close as they can get.
Gillette is grooming men, with or without razors. It brought the year's sharpest marketing idea with the 2019 Super Bowl ad blitz, and its most hotly debated.
Gillette's literal breakthrough, disrupting a morning shaving scene, was a parade of bullies, hecklers and sexists. Men in the Gillette ad take stock of these fools on the march, look at themselves in the shaving mirror and place themselves in the scene, interruptors taking back the power. Setting the jerks straight. Teaching their children. Being mature. "It's only by challenging ourselves that we can get closer to our best," the script concludes.
What's going on here? Procter & Gamble is still selling razors—it's always good for grooming products to use the word "closer," no matter the context. What confounded many viewers was the pitch to young men, and for that matter young women, as they sort out their new roles in the #MeToo experience.
Gillette's 2-minute spot, too pricey for Super Bowl airing, made a bold (and yet awkward) offer to set them straight not just with shaving, but also with those other adult things. It's betting that the way to a man's heart is through what he can stomach. Welcome to purpose marketing.
P&G brands are all in on purpose. P&G's feminine hygiene product Always made a Gillette-style pivot on the phrase "like a girl." Tide introduced a plant-based detergent, and Dawn washed oil-slick ducklings. Still, most household goods makers seemed to nap while P&G stayed woke.
