- Just a bit of food for thought…

* it's true that big corporations are (probably) more often than not nothing close to authentic. And since it's mostly public companies that are funding national and global branding campaigns, this is almost always the case. But I believe there are some corporations that are smaller, privately held, or still run by their founders, that are adhering to some authentic corporate DNA in their brand. I also believe that the market has room for a lot more brands than exist today. (Just as there are more than enough music consumers to patronize musicians that aren't in the top 40.)

* Unilever has made a choice – their corporate brand is meaningless. So this dichotomy is not a problem for them. Their seemingly contradictory positions wrt Dove and Axe aren't a problem unless they decided to accrue credit for those brands to the parent company. It's possible they could have taken that path and told a story about Unilver that rationalizes the two campaigns (Unilever == pluralism??) but that's not the path they took.

* While I chafe at some of the cynicism of the two campaigns (and at corporations that aren't transparent about what drives them beyond money) at least they are going for it. What would be worse than this inconsistency is muddying both messages in the name of some faux corporate consistency. I've been in that world and all it produces is pablum that no cusomter identifies with.

This video by Rye Clifton is a great example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwDEF-w4rJk

and was the core visual when I blogged on this issue (Axe the Evolution)

In general, I would be surprised if most people actually thought that Keebler cookies were baked by elves in a hollow tree or that Dove was produced by a feminist discussion workshop. It seems to me that if consumers want to affiliate with a message or an idea expressed in an advertising campaign, their loyalty would be more likely to be to the idea than to the corporate entity behind it. They like the brand because it is "voting" in favor of their values, not because they identify with the company behind it.

Smart consumers certainly would be leery of buying into corporate "authenticity", as examples like Anita Roddick's Body Shop attest. Some people might even think that psychological projection predicts that organizations are often most guilty of what they profess to deplore in others–hence ACORN and PIRG are known as abusive workplaces, Hollywood portrayers of evil businessmen are unusually unethical in their own dealings, Bill and Hillary Clinton were originally rhetorical supporters of sexual harassment complainants, and so on. If you know you would do something bad, you may think that stirring up fears against that very sin would be a good way of attracting support. If Unilever's moralizing about exploitive female imagery in the media is similarly projective, that hypocrisy would neither invalidate their argument on its merits nor make them especially unusual.

The really difficult question (as I write about here http://freedompictures.ca/2007/11/28/dove-soap-may-find-itself-in-hot-water/) is how far a "brand" can go in proselytizing on social issues in the context of what is still a brand-sell message. At the outset, the Dove campaign celebrated women and their individual expressions of beauty, which has proven a demonstrably apt and appealing message for Dove. But it was the furthest thing from judgemental.

However, as they move into what is in effect judging the industry of which they are a major part (as they do in my view with the "Evolution" execution), they move into territory that invites deeper scrutiny of the corporation, not to mention potential cynicism with regard to the overall Dove message.

There is a point in discussing how two sets of values embraced in commercials by two so-called product brands represent some sort of integrity with the corporate brand – or wether they don't. Evidently, and to an increasing degree, consumers see through product brands and take into account which company the product (and "it's" communication) comes from. In a study on resource partitioning in the beer market, Carroll found that consumers preferred beer that came from a family-owned, local business using handcraft and their own recipes which explains why the number of microbreweries have risen ten-fold over the past twenty years. More importantly, it shows that consumers are interested in the organizational identity behind the product – not just the product and it's features (or it's advertising). Along the same lines there are lots of studies that connect the reputation of a company to the buying preferences of the customers. And guess what the primary dimension of a company's reputation people rely on the most? The authenticity of the organization, followed by transparency, integrity, trustworthiness and a few others.

Now it may be that Unilever decides for themselves what to do with their product brands and how they want to communicate to two relatively different consumer segments. However this blog, Youtube and loads of other sources have made it possible for people to understand and investigate the companies they support much better. And to make things "worse" the New Realists, Cultural Creatives, Creative Class-members, New Consumers and Inner-directeds (choose any of them, they have sort of similar preferences) all want authentic experiences delivered by authentic companies because they want to surround themselves with things/people/organizations they can believe in. Is Unilever one of them? Well, not as far as I can tell from all the comments before mine – if Unilever was driven by greater meaning than making money and had a clearer heritage we probably wouldn't be discussing this. And the Axe/Dove commercials would both carry a value-system that might not be similar but certainly with more shared beliefs.

By the way, I like the commercials/campaigns we're discussing. I just see how the modernist separation of the corporate brand and product brands is working to a lesser degree than it did 10-20 years ago. And that doesn't mean that all messages from a large corporation doing business across 2-digit numbers of markets have to communicate the same everywhere. It just means that it has to come from a shared set of beliefs and hence show some degree of connection to the company that makes the stuff and delivers the message.

(you're not a Newcastle supporter are you srp?)

Neither of these has much to do with the Axe message of fictitiously releasing hypnotic phereomones that turn normal girls into aggressive sex maniacs. Body type is orthogonal to one's susceptibility to fictitious hypno-sex pheromones.

For those who like to avoid the specific meanings of the two campaigns and resort to vague innuendos about "how the media represents women," I still don't see the problem with the Axe campaign. If you think it shows a view of women as having tremendous repressed sexuality, isn't that pretty much the main point of much feminist literature? If you think the Axe campaign is saying that only chemical warfare is capable of getting women aroused, isn't that a testimony to their chastity and virtue?

Some people seem to think that simply showing women displaying an interest in sex is demeaning. Those people need to look in the mirror to see who represents women in an unflattering way. They might also want to purchase or rent a sense of humor.