Renault ‘lady driver’ ad riles women
WANT to fix your chipped nail polish and that scratch on the hood of your car in one go, madame?
Renault says it has just what you need.
In a bid to promote its Twingo city car, a small urban vehicle mostly aimed at women, French car maker Renault this week unveiled a nail polish that can also be used to fix small paint flaws on cars.
The move earned the company charges of sexism.
The Twingo is for “active lady drivers who need to get about town but who are also attentive to fashion and looks”, Renault said, presenting its foray into the beauty business.
For women’s rights activists, Renault’s marketing strategy is just plain sexist. The way the offer has been promoted hasn’t helped either.
In the Renault commercial, a woman screams “ouch” as she sees a scratch on her blue Twingo, parked between two vehicles. She then paints her nail in blue, before hiding the car scratch with a brush stroke.
This “reduces women to their beauty concerns and inability to drive”, said Marie-Noëlle Bas, the head of the French feminist collective Chiennes de Garde. “This insidious, ordinary, daily sexism lays the groundwork for the worst as ads confine women to a constructed role.”
A Renault spokesman disputed the perception that the commercial or polish were sexist.
Twingo cars target “urban women who enjoy customisation of their cars”, he said, noting the video didn’t show a woman who could not park properly.
The Twingo nail polish has been on sale at Renault’s workshops and on its website since Monday for à8.90 (about R126) and comes in blue, red, black and yellow.
For the maker of the nail polish, Ink and Out CEO Benjamin de Blanzy, the controversy over Renault’s video is both “amusing” and “rather legitimate”.
“It’s funny because men too will use it,” he said, adding that he started using nail polish on his car a few months ago to cover minor scratches.
The backlash comes less than a month after a video by Pepsi drew criticism on social media for exploiting movements including Black Lives Matter.
Pepsi pulled the commercial from its YouTube page in less than 48 hours and apologised.
“We are in a completely different perspective with this video, which is better-thoughtout,” the spokesman said. — Bloomberg