Sunday night Gillette put a ninety second film online about men, bullying, harassment, and the phrase it has used since 1989. By Monday morning the dislike count on YouTube was climbing faster than anything I have watched in this industry, and my group chat of former agency people had produced roughly two hundred messages, none of them about the edit.
Every one of them was about whether the brand had made a catastrophic error.
I have read the takes. Razor company alienates razor buyers. Boycott photos of Mach 3 handles in trash cans. A hundred think pieces on brands staying in their lane, most written by people who have never had to defend a positioning statement to a finance team.
Here is the part that gets lost. A position that everyone agrees with is not a position. It is a greeting card.
If a brand can state its point of view and nobody objects, the point of view was never worth the money it cost to produce.
Gillette has spent thirty years telling men what the best version of themselves looks like. That was always the pitch. What changed is that the definition got specific, and specificity is where audiences split. Nike found this out in September when it put Colin Kaepernick on a poster and watched people burn shoes they had already paid for. The shoes were already paid for. That detail matters more than most of the coverage admitted.
The failure case is not backlash. The failure case is a brand that says something loud, discovers half its audience is upset, and quietly walks it back inside a month. That is when you learn the position was borrowed for a quarter. Patagonia does not walk anything back. That is why the company gets read as sincere even by people who disagree with it.
So the test for Gillette is not this week's sentiment. It is March. It is whether the retail plans, the sponsorships, the recruiting, and the product marketing behave like a brand that meant it, or whether the whole thing turns out to have been a film with no company attached to it.
If a brand can state its point of view and nobody objects, the point of view was never worth the money it cost to produce.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The moment the negative comments start, someone senior always suggests a clarifying statement. The clarifying statement is how positions die. Not from the fight, from the apology for having started one.
Karaoke was last Thursday, at the sticky-floored place in Southeast. I sang a Journey song badly and fully, and the host, who calls everyone baby, told me commitment covers a lot of wrong notes. Correct about singing. Correct about this too.