Brand Hypocrisy: They Really Want Your Money

    In September 2004, the soap and shampoo company, Dove, launched their Real Beauty Campaign.  The idea behind this campaign was to appeal to women by using “real” women in their advertisements.  The idea was that women in the media were being portrayed as unrealistically thin and were designed to make women feel bad about themselves and their bodies.  Advertisements for Dove did this as well in order to sell more products to “make you more beautiful”.  Dove runs this campaign with projects like Real Beauty Sketches and several short films about self esteem, confidence, and the media.  This campaign is ongoing and continues to make ads such as the Onslaught ad.  The ad opens to a young, sweet-looking little girl.  The rest of the advertisement shows a montage of various advertisements for clothes, shoes, and beauty products.  The ads show enhanced and extremely sexualized women, and then changes to various advertisements for diets.

Dove's Onslaught Ad

    AXE is another soap and shampoo company, but this company, where Dove is almost exclusively for women, makes entirely male products.  The first words that pop up on their website read, “Girls are getting hotter! Keep your cool with AXE Black Chill.”  One click further brings up the words, “Be it a competitive Sporty Girl, a tireless Party Girl, or a High Maintenance Girl, the hottest girls are always the most demanding.”  The way that AXE sells its product is predominantly through commercials that show normal men who spray on an AXE product and are subsequently attacked by women who are “driven wild” by the glorious smell.  This result has been dubbed “The AXE Effect”.  All of the women in AXE ads are very thin, have flawless complexion, and rarely speak.  These ads have been called offensive, sexist, and degrading (which they are).  However, this is not the first time that AXE has been accused of sexist advertising.  They has a relatively lively history of questionable depictions of women.  In 2006, while Dove was making a short film called Evolution, AXE was running a different campaign, “Playful Public Fantasies”.  One of the products that resulted from this campaign was something called the AXE Mmmousepad.  This is extremely sexist and objectifying.  AXE campaigns like this one suggest that women are things that exist only to make men happy and to be possessed by them.  The Venn diagram of men who own a Mmmousepad and men that women should not date is a circle.  It is designed entirely to objectify and insult.   

AXE Snake Peel Ad

    The slogan for the Snake Peel ad is “Scrub Away the Skank”.  This ad shows a man who is clearly just waking up from a quite wild one night stand.  It then shows him disgustedly washing away both the filth and the memories from the previous night.  I hope that  I do not need to explain that the word skank is sexist by itself.

    In the end, both of these brands are attempting to accomplish the same goal.  They are both attempting to boost the confidence of their given demographic.  The problem, though is in the way that they try to accomplish this.  One of the brands does this by tearing the other gender down, but the other brand does this by instilling good morals and self esteem in their patrons.  Using women only for sexual appeal is discriminatory.

    Both of these companies have extremely conflicting viewpoints, yet they are both owned by Unilever.  Big corporations, like Unilever, create brands like AXE and Dove so that they can sell more products to a larger spread of people.  They can use these brands to create certain marketing campaigns to pander to certain demographics of people who believe certain things.  These companies do not really care about any of their “brand values” as long as each specific brand continues to make money.  While Dove was busy building women up with a constructive campaign about beauty and self image and the importance of being yourself and loving your body, AXE was endorsing ideas that would not just affect the way that men think that it is alright to treat women, but also how women see themselves.
    Also, it is not simply AXE and Dove that are having this discussion of insincerity.  If you watch the Vlogbrothers video Hypocrisy, then Hank Green will tell you that this happens everywhere.  The company that owns the soft core porn magazine Nuts also owns Hanna-Barbara, which makes children's cartoons.  The company that owns Spike TV, which features shows like Ink Masters, Tattoo Nightmares, Bar Rescue, and Impact Wrestling, also owns Nickelodeon.  What about food?  The vegetarian good-for-animals Boca Burgers are owned by the same people that own Oscar Meyer and A1 Steak Sauce.  Also, the healthy choice, diet Slim Fast is owned by the company that owns EVERY BRAND OF ICE CREAM EVER INCLUDING BEN & JERRY'S!!!  Not Ben & Jerry's!  They sold out to the man! *sigh*
     And National Geographic!  Beautiful National Geographic that talks about the miracle that is this jaw-dropping planet that we live on...is owned by the same people who own the uber-conservative Fox News...(which is not an actual news station).  Also, Disney which is responsible for some of your fondest childhood memories (don't deny it) owns New Line Cinema and Miramax.  That means that Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Scream are all technically Disney movies.  Yes, they are very careful to keep their name away from these films, but that does not mean that it isn't there.

    As it turns out, there is only one true corporate philosophy: Make more money. If this means spending money to promote good things like loving your body and healthy eating so that people will buy their products, then they will do that.  However, these large companies do not have anything resembling a conscience.  Their only goal is to make more money.  Sometimes it is easy to forget that.