I can take a hint. I won't buy any Dr. Pepper ever again.
Here at Brass Knuckles Media we’re all about crossing boundaries and forcing conversations–so long as its done in a smart and respectful way. So when Dr. Pepper launched their decidedly sexist marketing campaign we saw it as a teaching opportunity. What better way to learn then from someone else’s mistake.
So what was it about Dr. Pepper’s approach that attarcted so much female ire when so many other brands run “manly” campaigns on a regular basis without protest?
#1 They Openly Targeted Women
Many brands have a male dominant market and play to it well. The beer guys are the best. Heineken and Dos XX play up the idealistic image of a man’s man while the Light beer commercials do a good job with their “man down” and “that’s the second unmanly thing you’ve done” campaigns. Where Dr. Pepper erred was in their openly targeting women with directed sexist comments. Its okay to ask guys to be guys, but when you trash gals for being gals you’re just begging for the pink hammer to come down on you.
#2 They MisUnderstood The Market
Some products its safe to say are pretty much a guys brand–Heineken, Axe Body Spray, etc–but soda? Sodas are a gender neutral product, even if in a “lighter” variety. Plus, when it comes to whose buying the groceries 80% of all purchases are made by women. Those aren’t odds I’d like to bet against.
#3 They Tried To Censor Their Audience.
As you can see in this post from ClickZ women from Canada to Yemen went directly to Dr. Pepper’s facebook account to complain. Dr. Pepper responded by deleting their comments. New media comes with new rules. You can set up guidelines but you can’t censor your audience. A better move would’ve have been to open up a dialogue, apologize, find common ground, and work toward a solution–ahem–which Dr. Pepper claims was the purpose of their gender dividing campaign all along. You wanted to force conversations, don’t try and hide from them when they come to beat down your door. People allow brands to make mistakes, so long as they recognize and respond to public outcry. If you ignore the public or respond with insensitivity, well, hopefully your brand will recover. If not, that’s more for the rest of us!
Bottom line–think before you act and if you put your foot in your mouth acknowledge and ask for forgiveness and help rectifying the situtaion. Oh, and don’t piss of the ladies. We like to hold grudges.
P.O. Box 341821
I’m a woman, and I prefer to hold a Heineken than a grudge, but otherwise, this is a great lesson in marketing. They could’ve even said “Little Girls” and gotten by with it – but “Not for Women”? Okay, fine. Liked Coca-Cola (or Heineken) better, anyway. Whatever. Buh-bye, Dr. Pepper. That’s just too easy. No “conversation” required!
I’m a tequila girl myself but yeah, the conversation aspect they were going for seems to have eluded them. Thanks for commenting!
I’m a guy. I drink Dr. Pepper. I also have noticed how soda companies have been making a strong play at branding diet version of their sodas to men, which have to this point been overwhelmingly marketed and consumed by women. I think it started in 2007-2008 with Coke Zero. Black masculine label, compared to the lighter grey Diet Coke. As far as I could tell, the ingredients had changed only enough to actually be able to justify calling it a different product, but in my mind it was still a diet drink. You drank it so you didn’t gain weight, which has never been something I cared about. However, Coke did a better job of marketing Coke Zero to me, and I did find myself in a few months drinking more coke zeroes than all the diet cokes I had consumed in my entire life. The branding worked, even though I still try to ignore diet drinks.
Now Dr. Pepper is trying the same thing. By saying, “it’s not for women,” they’re too overt about the fact that the majority of the male population is strongly discouraged from consuming something, *and therefore identifying themselves with*, anything that has a feminine brand. This does not go both ways. Girls are not nearly so discouraged from consuming something masculine. The women who love scotch over coconut flavored rum earn special favor in the company of men. Men who love coconut flavored rum, and choose it over scotch end up being made fun of by both sexes.
So Dr. Pepper did something that on the surface rings very true with men. They said, hey guys, this is masculine, and you know it’s masculine because women aren’t allowed. But, as Shennandoah pointed out, they did it in a really ham-handed way. Dos Equis and Heineken show you the product of being a man’s man, and then indirectly associate powerful masculine qualities with their brand. They tell the story of men living adventurous lives, who also enjoy their beer. There isn’t an overt rejection of anyone other than less manly men, which no one really seems to have a problem with because those men wish they were more manly to begin with. Further, women are celebrated in their own right, and their presence in your life is seen as symptomatic of true masculinity. Both Dos Equis and Heineken are stating that if you’re a real man, living a life you love, women like to be around you. I think that’s probably true. Women tend to get interested when a man has a real sense of purpose and direction and he knows what he wants.
Dr. Pepper, on the other hand, just says, “this is a boys only club. Women, get lost.” This has its appeal. Men and women both need to have their own domains to be themselves. And I think that men are searching for an identity in this culture that they can call their own. The borders around so much territory that men used to have sole domain over has indeed been blurred by inclusiveness, and the identities of other parts of our global community that have been finding their voices in the last 100 years. Inclusiveness is the order of the day. So it’s damning when Dr. Pepper has an overtly exclusive message. Even though men still have a desire to have a boys-only area, it is very risky in this culture for any one group to say, no body else (but our community) is allowed beyond these velvet ropes. I don’t think it’s automatically an inappropriate statement to make, on the part of men or women. But it can be expected that women will automatically be upset when a man tells them they can’t do something. Especially with suffrage and reproductive choice echoing in the recent memory of American culture. You don’t tell anyone that they don’t have a right to do something. Unless he’s a man, and he’s telling a woman she can’t do something.
I do think the comparison to Dos Equis and Heineken is illustrative of the real branding lesson. Those brands are more powerful because they define masculinity by saying what it is. Dr. Pepper limited its message by only defining masculinity by saying what it isn’t. [Aside: It should be expected that the diet version of a soft drink will have weaker branding than the harder stuff.] Defining only in the negative is always a limited exercise, and so it should be expected that the Dr. Pepper action hero marketing campaign comes across as a cheap knockoff of the epic drama of the Most Interesting Man in the World. Arnold will never ever measure up to Hemingway. Ever. I don’t care how much he weighs, or how big his explosion is. Keep Conan the Barbarian and the Terminator. I’ll stick with For Whom the Bell Tolls.