The use of social movements in marketing

Abstract: In today’s marketing, we now and then see organizations using socio-political movements. This phenomenon often creates questions amongst its audience whether the organization genuinely cares about the movement, or whether it is just an easy way to capitalize on the movement. In this study, we wanted to examine further how the audience perceives brands, which marketing alludes on social movements, by examining some aspects connected to the brand and the choice of movement. Furthermore, this study aims to identify if there are some crucial factors that should be considered in order to create a successful advertisement that alludes on a social movement. To be able to examine this phenomenon we choose to do a case study on Gillette’s advertisement “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” an advertisement that alludes on the #Metoo movement. Furthermore, we choose to conduct a mixed method with a qualitative approach, where we created a survey questionnaire to gather our empirics, that we, later on, analyzed qualitatively. What we were able to identify after analyzing our empirics, where the majority of our respondents expressed a positive attitude towards the advertisement. Hence a defined pattern was that a lot of the respondent expressed a questioning attitude towards the real purpose of the advertisement. Despite the positive attitude towards the advertisement, we could identify that the majority of the respondents had a neutral attitude toward Gillette as a brand after watching the advertisement.