Gillette CEO: $8 billion loss is ‘price worth paying’ over #MeToo campaign

Reads the headline of a recent article in the Washington Examiner. They Tweeted the article with the following comment: “Gillette’s controversial marketing campaign targeted at the #MeToo movement cost the company $8 billion. Still, its CEO says he does not regret a thing. It’s “a price worth paying” he said.”

The Tweeted comment is completely false, and not substantiated within the article. The article itself was a brief summary and explanation of an interview given by Gillette CEO Gary Coombe did with Marketing Week, which was linked within the article. Gillette’s parent company, Proctor and Gamble (P&G), posted record high shares recently despite having to give their Gillette subsidiary an $8 billion writedown, according to the article they linked from Reuters. P&G acquired Gillette in 2005 for $57 billion, and valued the asset during the acquisition.

Over the last five years, the total market for men’s shaving sales have literally been decimated (i.e. being reduced by a tenth). At the same time, competing brands such as Unilever, who owns Dollar Shave Club, has been able to increase its share of that declining market. Men are spending less money on shaving than they were in past years.

In an effort to target younger men (who could hopefully be turned into long-term brand-loyalists), Gillette released an insipid ad campaign referencing notions of masculinity vis a vis mainstream 3rd wave feminist discourse. It made the rounds through online Discourse. A handful of cranks whined about it, and then the corporate media bleated about how horrible that was, and then there was the traditional commentary on the commentary. It was all very stupid.

Nonetheless, the ad campaign followed the decline of the company’s sales; it was a consequence, not a cause. I do not have any data on how the campaign may have affected sales regardless. However, in the interview with Coombe in MarketingWeek, he states, “The worst thing during through that period was, we also lost connection with the millennial generation. Gillette quickly became the brand of the millennial generation’s dads.” Although I doubt the ad campaign was responsible for that. Millennials know that beards kick ass.