Unilever, the $143.8 billion vampire squid of toiletries and snacks, is promising to remove the word "fair" from the name of its skin-whitening cream "Fair and Lovely". It will also stop calling it whitening cream in marketing materials. Racism solved!
"We recognise that the use of the words 'fair', 'white' and 'light' suggest a singular ideal of beauty that we don't think is right, and we want to address this."
"The brand has never been and is not a bleaching product," Unilever added.
The consumer goods giant also said that it had removed before-and-after impressions and "shade guides" on Fair & Lovely packaging in 2019. The skin care range is sold across countries such as India, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan.
Unilever's move comes as cosmetics firms around the world reassess their product lines and marketing strategies in light of the Black Lives Matters movement, sparked by George Floyd's death.
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I know she doesn't specifically say that these are all emails from Brands™ or PR people — but I think we all know the truth. Either way, that's some beautiful god damn poetry.
Image: John Cummings / Wikimedia Commons (CC 4.0)
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Burger King's switching to preservative-free ingredients, and chose to market this fact by showing what will now happen to its sandwiches if they are left out uneaten. Welcome to the intersection of advertising and earned media, puke bags are under the seats. Read the rest
Staples has unveiled a new logo, pictured above (with the old logo beneath it).
Notice what's wrong with it? The store is called Staples but the logo depicts only a single staple. The old "L" hinted at the physical object, to be sure, but so abstractly it wasn't a problem.
The fix:
Now we can sleep at night. You're welcome! Read the rest
Launched as a NYC skateshop in 1994, streetwear brand Supreme has become a religion for hypbeasts (and the flippers who serve them). Now, a private collector is auctioning off their collection of every single Supreme skate deck ever made, many of which are emblazoned with graphics from esteemed contemporary artists. The lot of 248 skateboard decks along with the Louis Vuitton Boite skateboard trunk with tool kit, trucks, wheels and shoulder strap is expected to bring around $1 million but I bet it goes for much more. From Sotheby's:
Supreme started producing their own skateboards in 1998 and have collaborated with many well-known brands over the last 20 years - most famously with Louis Vuitton. Supreme is also known for their artist collaborations, featuring the likes of George Condo, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, KAWS, Marilyn Minter, Nate Lowman, and Takashi Murakami, among others.
"Own the Entire Supreme Skateboard Collection, Now Open for Bidding" (Sotheby's, thanks Lux Sparks-Pescovitz!)
Decks by Marilyn Minter and Jeff Koons and Louis Vuitton Boite skateboard trunk with accessories:
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In the early 1970s, Levi's ran these fantastic psychedelic TV commercials with narration by Ken Nordine, the beat creator of the pioneering Word Jazz albums of the 1950s that melded far-out poetry with hip musical accompaniment. Far fucking out.
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A popular conspiracy theory about millionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump is that his campaign is really just a big advertising effort for his "brand": the Trump name he licenses out to anyone who will pay for it. If this was his plan, Alexandra Bruell writes in the Wall Street Journal, it was a bad one. The tape of him boasting about sexually assaulting women hits particularly hard.
As of June 2016, when Mr. Trump was already the presumptive Republican nominee for president, the added value of the Trump brand in entertainment was as high as 43%.
But that added value has been significantly diminished since the video surfaced. The perceived added value in TV and entertainment, a category with which he’s closely associated after “The Apprentice,” fell 13 percentage points as of Oct. 9, while the value of the Trump brand dropped 8 percentage points in real estate and 6 percentage points in country clubs and golf clubs, according to Brand Keys.
“What we know for sure is that these brand engagement numbers correlate very highly with consumer behavior in the marketplace,” said Mr. Passikoff. As the Trump brand becomes more toxic, “consumers will be distancing themselves from Trump-branded products as well.”
Even if his remarks subside in the public imagination, he's in it to the end, and "Trump" could end up signifying bigshot losers. Not great for any business, but bigly so in hospitality and entertainment. Read the rest
The company formerly known as Siemens Healthcare, as august and sterile as they come in the German healthcare business, is being rebranded as "Healthineers" in advance of a public stock offering. At best, it's cringe humor, right down to the Teletubbies-style dance music (above, described by the Financial Times as "writhing spandex horror") from the launch event. Read the rest
Apple's signaled that its desktop operating system is to be renamed MacOS, making the questionable search string "OS X" a thing of the past. The new brand turned up on an environmental webpage at its site (an official manifestation of hints already found in technical documents), though it was soon replaced by the currently-official name. Read the rest
Caity Weaver spotted that Sure Deodorant had inaugurated a poll in which not a single person voted. Read the rest
According to a survey of 200,000 Americans, Miller High Life is the most bi-partisan of beers. Republicans favor Samuel Adams and, apparently, there are a lot of Democrats drinking Heineken. (Although one might argue that these results are heavily skewed, as the survey did not include either microbrews or microparties. God only knows what the Libertarians are drinking.) There's a chart. Yay, charts! (Via Kevin Zelnio) Read the rest
