Its only just weeks into 2019, and UK social media has already been stirred up by two recent marketing exercises. Firstly, the hugely successful (though fairly innocuous) Gregg’s vegan sausage roll PR campaign and most recently a campaign from one of Britain’s best known male grooming brands.
The Gillette “Believe” campaign kicked a perhaps a slightly lesser volatile hornet’s nest which prompted men to be “The best a man can be” by considering and holding each other accountable for their actions.
Unsurprisingly the campaign easily aroused a feeling of contempt in flaccid potato faced shite house Piers Morgan. More surprisingly however I thought was the hugely negative reaction from Gillette’s consumer base, the majority of which appeared incensed by the recent advert denouncing deplorable behaviour by the actors within the short clip.
I can sort of see how some men may interpret the ad as patronising, as most males don’t need a shaving company to tell them how not to behave. However, one tweet claiming “(Gillette) has made it clear they do not want the business of masculine men.”, seemed to encompass (rightly or wrongly in my assumption) the mindset in which all the furore stems from.
The long held conception of the “boys will be boys” mentality when we talk about issues of contemporary masculinity seems to be getting more and more out dated, and this latest Gillette ad shines a light onto the attitudes of this demographic. For so long masculinity has been geared towards men living up to stereotypes. But in 2019, we find that modern masculinity moving towards the breaking of stereotypes, and being (excuse the term) “man enough” to challenge them.
In the same way that vegans are harangued for simply not wanting to eat meat, men are shunned for not conforming to the stereotypical attributes expected of their role within society. Surely it takes more guts to realise and live out your own values than to simply conform to what everyone else is doing? Progression has never been about conformity for the sake of a quiet life.
It seems symptomatic (although slightly pathetic) of a society conditioned to live up to these stereotypes to resist new ideas, and ridicule anyone who wishes to live their life in a different way as a knee jerk reaction. And in the age of the #metoo movement which has achieved so much to emancipate women who have been mistreated, it seems that men are suffering at the hands of these same draconian attitudes that the opposite sex have had to (and still do) endure.
As much as Gillette holding up a mirror to the minority of men who assert abhorrent behaviours, this advert just as much acts as a magnifying glass to the majority of men to stand up for their own values. If 2018 kicked open the doors on challenging gender stereotypes, 2019 just slid in on its knees .