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Gillette proves that cultural relevance is key to a brand’s future performance

In an age of so much cultural change, it’s vital that brands regularly take stock of their “relevance” in current society. For a 117-year old brand like Gillette, exploring what masculinity actually means in this day and age was essential for its continued existence.

Gillette is a brand that used to be only about the product and its performance; the clean-shaven business-look of previous decades. But ideas about male grooming are evolving, and so too is the concept of masculinity and what it means to be a man.

To combat a slow march into irrelevance (how many more blades can a razor have?), Gillette released an ad in January that took radical action to shift the conversation to being about who men want to be.

Read more: Gillette needs to sharpen up if it wants to stop ‘toxic masculinity’

Gillette abandoned its iconic “the best a man can get” slogan in favour of something more subtle, more inclusive, and more progressive.

By instead asking “is this the best a man can get?” and turning the statement into a question, the brand has appropriately read the cultural feeling of the time and changed course.

No longer is there some mythic idea about pursuing an idealised masculinity which can never fully be reached, but instead acting practically now, and achieving a more socially viable and vital masculinity.

The results speak for themselves – the campaign went viral and sparked national debate, with the sales outlook remaining positive.

The precedent for this brave but essential shift in brand image was set last year when Nike chose the controversial quarterback Colin Kaepernick as the face of its thirtieth anniversary campaign. Nike made a similar choice to Gillette, risking the custom of the proportion of the US population who want to “Make America Great Again.” Nike’s sales increased by 31 per cent in the wake of the divisive Kaepernick campaign.

Both campaigns seem to risk alienating their core consumer base by making a clear cultural choice with profound implications for future sales and growth performance. But both are calculated risks, and reveal brands which understand that cultural change is influencing their customers’ attitude and behaviour. So they are making a long-term bet to keep their brand aligned with that changing culture.

Read more: If any brand has the power to take on toxic masculinity, it’s Gillette

This is a profoundly important business decision – continue with a long-term decline in sales as brand relevance wanes, or bite the bullet and pivot towards new meaning and values along the direction of travel that your customers are taking.

Almost every consumer brand will need to make a similar choice at some point. Doing this well requires continual investment in understanding cultural context and your brand’s relationship to it.

After all, purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by cultural perceptions, and in today’s incredibly fluid age of ideas, values, shared content and influence, brands need a rolling investment in their cultural connections and strategies to cope with the most profound and important generational issues.

Such a strategy in the form of periodic on-going audits of cultural relevance might well become an issue that shareholders and investors quiz management on.