Before Gillette hits us with lectures on how to treat women, maybe it should take a look in the mirror...

THE ad caused uproar the very second it dropped on the internet. For 30 years, the tagline for Gillette has been, The Best A Man Can Get. This week, though, that changed to The Best Men Can Be, and the ad was a mission statement about what this actually means.

Starting with audio clips about bullying, harassment and the #MeToo movement, born in protest at workplace sexual harassment and assault, it runs through scenarios in which boys bully other boys, men ogle women passing in the street, and a lone woman in a business boardroom is patronised by a male colleague, in a display of what has become known as ‘mansplaining’.

Militant

It ends with a screen title that reads: ‘It’s only by challenging ourselves to do more that we can get close to being our best.’ And that, you might have thought, is a laudable message promoting equal rights and mutual respect for all.

Well, you’d be wrong. The reaction was brutal, with men taking to social media to protest. On the mild end of the scale, they complained that it painted all men as bullies and would-be predators.

For others, this assault on what has become known as toxic masculinity was the inevitable result of what they see as militant feminism (the director, Kim Gehrig, has tackled similar themes many times in the past) and confirmed their fears that the aim is to emasculate men.

Thousands of them took to the internet to say they never would buy Gillette razors or shaving foam again, and would turn instead to discounters such as Dollar Shave, a US mail-order company that sends replacement blades in the post for a fraction of the cost.

On Gillette’s official YouTube channel, the ad has received 423,000 Likes, and 835,000 dislikes. Public figures such as Piers Morgan took to Twitter to lambast it, tweeting: ‘I’ve used Gillette razors my entire adult life but this absurd virtue-signalling PC guff may drive me away to a company less eager to fuel the current pathetic global assault on masculinity.

‘Let boys be damn boys. Let men be damn men.’

Perhaps a little panicked by being called out by so many when it probably expected a pat on the head for being ‘woke’, especially by millennials who like to feel the brands they chose are warm, fuzzy and on message, Gillette explained its strategy: ‘Turn on the news today and it’s easy to believe that men are not at their best. It’s time we acknowledge that brands, like ours, play a role in influencing culture. And as a company that encourages men to be their best, we have a responsibility to make sure we are promoting positive, attainable, inclusive and healthy versions of what it means to be a man.’

This all is a long way from selling razors, and, amusingly, the ad contains not a single scene of a man shaving. It’s a shame, because Gillette, in many ways, is a laudable company. Founded in 1901 by King C Gillette, a Chicagoan of French Huguenot ancestry, as the American Safety Razor Company, it changed its name the following year, and success was instant because of that one word – safety.

The cut-throat razors that went before were imprecise and dangerous. Gillette’s product was not the first safety razor, but it was immediately seen as the best. It cost five dollars – half the average weekly wage at the time, and it certainly feels as if little has changed when you go to buy replacement cartridges nowadays – but sold by the million.

Genius

Gillette’s genius was in realising that the money lay not in the razor itself, but in the replacement blades, and he also laid down a key principle that guides the company today – innovation. Men are incredibly susceptible to technological improvement, and Gillette has done that for over a century. It was the first to introduce a twin-blade razor, the Trac II in 1971, to cut down on the time spent in front of the mirror. It bettered that with the Mach 3 three-blade razor in 1998 and, in 2006, the Fusion, with five front blades and a sixth at the back of the cartridge to trim close to the nose.

Personally, I’ve shaved with Gillette razors all my life because of one thing – they just don’t cut you. On occasions when I’ve been abroad and forgot to bring my razor, I’ve bought the likes of Bic disposables and ended looking like one of the college kids in a slasher movie.

No matter where you go, Gillette razors and blades are expensive and you just don’t want to buy another when you know you already have two or three at home. There is genius in this, because the blades cost as little as ten cents to make, according to an insider, but retail at eyewatering multiples of that. Four Mach 3 blades cost €10.90 in Tesco, a mark-up of thousands of per cent.

Bulletproof

Indeed, if you want to know just how valuable they are, just look in your local shop, where they are kept behind the register, because they’re among the smallest items that sell for such exorbitant amounts, and attractive to thieves as a consequence. This perceived price gouging has seen Gillette lose market share in the US to the likes of Dollar Shave and its biggest competitor Schick, to the point where it has promised that, from April, prices for all its products will drop, and remain lower permanently.

Despite slowing sales, though, Gillette sits at No.32 on the Forbes magazine list of the most valuable brands in the world, and is so dominant in many Eastern European markets, the name Gillette has become the generic term for all razors, in the same way as we might say ‘where’s the hoover?’ even when it’s a Dyson.

With that much clout, and a massive marketing budget, maybe Gillette thought it was bulletproof against criticism, when it launched its new ad and slogan, but the opposite has proved the case. Not least because of that scene in the boardroom, where the man looks at the woman and then at the other men, and says: ‘What I actually think she’s trying to say…’, a put-down that leaves a look of consternation and frustration on her face.

Here, maybe Gillette could take note. It is part of the giant Procter & Gamble corporation’s portfolio of brands, and P&G’s own boardroom is home to only four women among the 13 directors.

If it wants to be a good corporate citizen, maybe it also could look at remuneration. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to declare the ratio of pay between the chief executive and the average worker – in 2017, this was 287 to 1.

And if it really cared so much for the women it wants all men to treat better, it could start by looking at the prices of its own products for women.

Four replacement blades for a man’s Mach 3 razor are €10.90, but four for a woman’s Gillette Venus are €11.90.

Eight disposable razors for men will cost you €4.49, while just four for women cost €4.34, almost exactly twice the price. So if the boycott takes flight and sales go down, Gillette won’t only have angered its primary customers, but their partners too – there can’t be a man alive who, when looking for his razor, finds that a wife or girlfriend has borrowed it, because she too is fed up with the fact that when it comes to price, men really do get the best.