Gillette, 2019: one word kept, a value changed, and a split audience

Since 1989 Gillette has signed its advertising with “The Best a Man Can Get”. For three decades the line carried a familiar picture: a confident man, a precise blade, a product engineered to be the best. In mid-January 2019 the brand released a short film online, made with the agency Grey, under a new line, “The Best Men Can Be”. It showed bullying, sexual harassment and the shrug of “boys will be boys”, and then showed men stepping in to stop them. Gillette pledged to give one million dollars a year for three years to non-profit programmes working with men and boys.

The reaction split sharply. On YouTube the film collected far more dislikes than likes within days, past a million, while many viewers, commentators and organisations praised it. Calls for a boycott spread on social media, and so did messages of support. Procter & Gamble, Gillette’s owner, said later that month that sales were in line with pre-campaign levels. In July 2019 P&G took a write-down of about 8 billion dollars on Gillette, which it attributed to currency, cheaper competitors and men shaving less often. Some commentators tied the write-down to the film, and P&G did not.

The same word, a different value

The new line kept one word, best, and moved what it measured. In the old line, best described the product and the man who bought it: performance, achievement, the top of the range. In the new one, best described conduct. The film asked its customers to be better men. That is a change of core value, and a large one, from excellence in the object to a judgement about behaviour.

The method treats values as a hand of cards played over time, and it has a clear rule for changing them. Keep a base of three or four values and replace one per cycle, when a planned trigger fires, so the familiar values carry the customer through the change. The reason is a mechanism worth knowing: values people once embraced stay in their heads as a reading lens, and they read the new value through it. Read through thirty years of “the best a man can get”, a film about how men should behave could feel like encouragement to some viewers and like an accusation to others. The old value shaped how the new one was heard.

The risk of the jump

The books describe a shortcut that strong brands take: moving from a functional benefit straight to a stance, and expecting the emotional bond to follow. It can work when the brand has earned authority on the ground it is jumping from. A razor is a mature, heavily contested product, and Gillette had been losing ground to cheaper online rivals for years. Its functional authority was real, and still easy for viewers to question when the subject changed from shaving to masculinity.

On the Promise Ladder, the film reached for the top rung, a call to change something in society. Each rung needs proof of its own, and the proof of a social promise takes years: programmes, partners, conduct inside the company, consistency across later campaigns. A single film announces the promise before that proof has had time to exist, and the space between them is where the strongest reactions grew, from both sides.

None of this decides whether the film’s message was right, and the debate it opened about men and behaviour was real. Our reading concerns the decision as a piece of brand strategy: a value changed all at once, carried by the most familiar line the brand owned, in front of an audience that had been told for thirty years that it was already the best.

What a brand can take from it

A brand that wants to move toward a value of responsibility has a gentler path. It can introduce the new value next to the ones customers already hold, prove it first in what the company does, and let the communication follow the proof. The order is slower, and it gives the base time to read the change as growth.

If your company is weighing a move to a new value, start by mapping which values your customers already hold you to, and which proofs would carry the new one. That is the kind of upstream reading we train your team to run before the campaign is shot.