Advertising: it’s a queer business
One recent muggy London evening, I went to a talk about diversity in advertising given by Richard Huntington, Chief Strategy Officer at Saatchi & Saatchi London.
I won’t attempt to summarise Richard’s talk here — I wouldn’t do it justice, and it was filmed, so it’s probably on YouTube now anyway— but you can no doubt make a good stab at the headline themes. Diversity matters, and we need to do it better.
It’s always fun to judge other people’s work, be it as agency or client — and as part of the evening, we got to watch a few different TV spots and interrogate them on their treatment of gender, race, sexuality — of non-normativity. One of those ads was for Axe (the brand known as Lynx in the UK) — purveyors of ‘grooming products’ for men. Historically one of the most rampantly male heterosexual brands ever, with what must be acknowledged to be incredible, very knowing, yet fundamentally regressive advertising hooked around helping hapless young men to ‘get the girl’, Axe is now repositioning itself as a brand for more progressive times. Here’s the ad we watched.
(I’ll admit — I like it. I’m a sap.)
We can take a lot of things from this advert, but here are three:
- Axe is for people who dance in heels
- Axe is for people who fall for men based on their record collections
- Axe is for people who love kittens
Those are, by happy coincidence, three of my defining characteristics.
So why isn’t Axe … for me?
Because another of my defining characteristics is, of course, that I am a woman. And Axe… Axe is for men.
So — can a brand have it both ways? Can you subvert the gender binary - muddling up the traits and characteristics that we’ve long considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ along one big beautiful queer spectrum where anyone can be anything and it doesn’t fucking matter, because this is 2016! … and then continue to market a product ‘for men’?
It’s a logical impossibility — an oxymoron. The two things are mutually exclusive. They cannot co-exist.
On the one hand, this ad says: The concept of masculinity/gender is just a big tangle of cultural norms — and we can unpick and unravel them, and weave them into any shape we damn well like, because we are individuals, not a category - and our choices aren’t defined by our genitalia.
But the entire premise of the product and the brand — literally Axe’s reason for being — says: This product is aimed at a certain category of human, because human behaviour is determined by genitalia - so buy this shower gel; it’s for people with penises.
This is what distinguishes Axe from other comparable ‘grooming’ or hygiene brands, like Dove or Sure. These other brands do, of course, gender their products (and I always buy the men’s versions, because they’re better value and better quality, and because even when shopping for deodorant, I like to fuck the patriarchy), and yes, they are all problematic in their own special sweet ways – but they don’t exist solely to serve one specific concept of gender. Axe, however, is just for men. It’s the Garrick Club of the grooming world… but with a float at Pride.
And that doesn’t make sense.
So what does the future look like for brands like Axe? If they really believe in a more progressive future, should they start marketing themselves to people - rather than just people with penises?
Could they even do that? For, although every Axe product can technically be useful to everyone, regardless of gender (most of us wash, shave, and style our hair), that would mean devising an entirely new brand strategy. Literally every decision about their brand and business— from the packaging to the scent — has been conceived with traditional gender roles and attributes in mind. Fuck it, literally the reason the product and the brand exists is, I assume, because someone once spotted a gap in the market — and that market was, like the society it existed within, structured by traditional concepts of gender and sexuality. Participate in the reshaping of that society, as Axe’s new ads seem to be suggesting they want to do, and it’s very possible that this gap disappears entirely.
This is a fundamental dichotomy for brands like Axe — and until they find a resolution to it, I’m not sure that they can ever do more than make tokenistic gestures towards progressive values. At some point the logic of progress will undermine the logic of gender on which these brands are built, and it’ll be very interesting to see what happens next.
(Thanks to Égalité, the LGBTI group at Publicis, for making the talk happen.)
