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This post, authored by Chris Bullick, was republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
Anxious Gen Z marketers and feminists of LinkedIn are passing the smelling salts round. Unilever has recently acquired ‘controversial’ US-based men’s grooming brand Dr Squatch.
Recently contacted by Cosmetics Business for comment, I didn’t hold back:
What’s not to like for Unilever? Dr Squatch is a unicorn. Far from being a startup, it was founded in 2013, has almost doubled revenue every year in the last five years to reach $400 million in 2024. The odds against that kind of performance in the beauty category are sadly very, very high. Like my alma mater P&G, Unilever doesn’t have the entrepreneurial instincts to create brands like Dr Squatch, but it know a strong buy when it sees one. And Unilever should be able to leverage distribution and marketing reach for the brand, but should also preserve its distinct character.
Of course what makes the acquisition really interesting is the really obvious flight from policy on ‘brand purpose’ – the dogma that holds brands must state a purpose that is beyond commercial, leading to brands co-opting progressive causes and claiming that cause to be their their real purpose, rather than merely being a useful product.
When Unilever CEO Alan Jope announced in 2019 that “brands without purpose had no long-term future at Unilever” it turned out that they would and he wouldn’t. When Hein Schumacher replaced Alan Jope in 2023, he described brand purpose as an “unwelcome distraction” that may have “diluted efforts” in terms of a focus on financial performance. Recently skewered by writers like Nick Asbury in his seminal Road to Hell, the ‘purpose’ ideology seems to be on its last legs. Good riddance.
The growth and sale of Dr Squatch is living proof of the vacuity of the brand purpose ideology. It is exquisitely ironic that the growth of the brand (under the radar for many marketers possibly uncomfortable with its success) coincided with peak woke in the marketing community, peak brand purpose and peak consumer dissatisfaction with ads and in particular their humourless preaching on the unrelated ‘progressive’ issues they had jumped on.
It’s ironic that while marketers were busy using their brand’s marketing budgets to affiliate the brands they were working on with their own favourite causes like BLM, ‘climate justice’ and ‘LGBTQ+ equality’, American males were switching to an irreverent brand that entertained them with its likeable, quirky and down-to-earth sense of humour.
It tells you a lot about the type of modern marketer that Dr Squatch is widely called ‘controversial’ – at least in marketing circles. Brands throwing money at BLM (and then quietly removing all references to it – looking at you Coca Cola) or campaigning against Israel? Nothing controversial there. But referring to bathwater in a marketing campaign, as Dr Squatch did in May when it launched a limited edition version of its soap infused with Hollywood actress Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater? Sickeningly hateful.
But not according to consumers who, as we know, don’t think like marketers. Pull’s own research showed the majority of consumers don’t actually want brands to support woke causes, they want them to “pay their taxes, treat people fairly and respect the environment”.
Dr Squatch also grew strongly at the time of P&G’s $7 billion act of self-harm when it decided to repurpose Gillette around the idea of ‘countering toxic masculinity’ with a humourless video depicting men behaving badly – something only men can do, of course, but which they can fortunately be diverted from by a razor brand’s promotional hectoring. (Can you imagine a female sanitary product campaign using a film created by a man urging women to ‘quit the bitchin’?)
No, Dr Squatch succeeded by appealing to ‘Budweiser man’ – that is, Budweiser man as he existed when the brand made this masterful ‘Wassup’ ad in 1999 (and in truth as he still was in 2023, if they had only bothered to look at their research).
Yes it was about the bros, but it was funny, emotionally engaging and for the time – diverse. But then VP of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid decided in 2023 that: “You’ve got to see people who reflect you in the work… I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out of touch humour, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
This ‘out of touch’ humour of course appealed to Bud buyers, but it was one that she as a progressive female millennial didn’t like. (I don’t think she really liked Bud buyers either.) What she decided Bud buyers wanted to see was a transgender influencer with the appearance of an adolescent girl drinking Bud in a bubble bath. Whatever the correct morals of the ensuing fiasco, the damage done to sales was in the billions of dollars. Bud sales in Jan 2025 were down 30% year on year. I’m not sure they can recover.
This is why Dr Squatch is a breath of fresh air. It’s irreverent, funny and entertaining and that makes it distinct today. I once pointed out that the role of all beauty product brands is really to make their buyers – mostly women – feel good about themselves. Dr Squatch does the same thing for many men. It’s humour is really only edgy because of the puritanical times we live in. But Dr Squatch gets that and exploits it well. I’ll drink to that (but obviously not the bathwater – that would be disgusting).
Chris Bullick is the founder of the Pull agency, which has conducted research on consumers attitudes to woke advertising. He is an occasional contributor to the Daily Sceptic. This article recently appeared on his Substack.
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The post What Is The Purpose Of Sydney Sweeney’s Bathwater? first appeared on modernity.
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