A few years ago I was sitting down at a table of fellow marketers at a luncheon when someone commented on my tie. My response was, “It’s amazing, a couple of episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and I was finding clothes in my closet that I never knew matched.”
The entire table fell over laughing at what I didn’t even think was a joke.
But even though their ratings are not what they were at first, the Fab Five of Bravo have started something, at least as far as Unilever is concerned.
An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal talks about an upcoming promotion Unilever is doing to introduce Sunsilk in the U.S. Sunsilk is currently the #2 shampoo in world sales behind P&G’s Pantene, but only sold in Europe, Latin American and Asia. Unilever is doing a promotion using three actors playing a girl’s best gay friends.
Interesting enough, it does not look like there will actually be commercials. According to the WSJ, Unilever “will position them as style experts and they will write advice columns in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Star, appear as commentators on television, and diagnose consumers' hair problems.”
Oh, by the way, the budget to do this is $200 million.
Sounds as if Unilever is going for the buzz of word-of-mouth marketing. They might also be looking for the viral effect once far right groups assail them for endorsing the gay lifestyle. It’s a good move because the Unilever target market of 20-something women is more tolerant of the gays. Meanwhile, Unilever will get that extra bump of press via editorials, letters to the editor, and some televised protests, but it will likely come from men on the right – not Unilever’s market.
But, hey, thanks for the exposure guys.
Come to think of it, perhaps I have been living under a rock. I don’t recall hearing a whole lot of protests about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. In fact, a few weeks after I made my clothes matching comment at the luncheon of marketers, I used the same line at a presentation I gave to a local chamber and they were quite a bit more conservative looking. They still fell on the floor laughing.
Maybe we are on the verge of taking the gay lifestyle mainstream.
Afterthought: By the way, if want to have a little more insight into gay lifestyles, I suggest reading some novels by Robert Rodi. For us heterosexuals, it is a window into the other end of the spectrum.
I never suspected.
Posted by: Russ | July 17, 2006 at 06:23 AM