MxMIndia

Tag: George Floyd

  • Is Unilever’s change of ‘Fair & Lovely’ to ‘Glow & Lovely’ merely cosmetic? And is the new name any good, asks Prabhakar Mundkur

    The Unfairness of It All

     

     

    By Prabhakar Mundkur

     

    When Hindustan Unilever announced its decision to rename its moneyspinner $500 million brand Fair & Lovely to Glow & Lovely, it was a classic case of doing too little too late.

     

    To imagine that the decision was perhaps based on the greatest upheaval of racist stereotyping of our time with the excruciating George Floyd pinned to the ground doesn’t say much for Hindustan Unilever’s decision. There is nothing to congratulate them about.  There can be no appeasement of public emotion. There can only be guilt and shame.

     

    Activists through the decades have objected to Unilever’s fairness cream but it needed a revolt as ugly as George Floyd’s death, for the great marketer to make this small move.  Not since Rosa Parks was denied a seat on a bus in Montgomery has the world been so affected by the colour bias of the human race.

     

    But how good is the new name Glow & Lovely? Decades of skin care research has shown that ‘Glow’ is a major benefit in for the skin care regimen. Just like ‘Shine’ is. a major benefit for hair. So, taking a benefit from research and planting it in a brand name is perhaps not the most creative way of configuring brand names. But then Unilever has not been particularly known for its creativity. That lesser brands like Emami had already pre-empted this thinking by naming their brands Glow & Handsome is a bit of a shame. After all, one expects leaders to show the way. Not follow in the footsteps of their smaller competitor in the FMCG business.

     

    But is Glow and Lovely a good name?

     

     There is a reason why Glow and Lovely doesn’t sound right given the vagaries of the English Language. The reason why it doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily as Fair and Lovely has to do with the English language. Both Fair and Lovely are adjectives. Glow on the other hand is either a verb or a noun depending on how you use it. Glowing & Beautiful would have sounded better in English. Because Glowing is an adjective. But it then lengthens the brand name. And Unilever might have decided they would stay close to the current syntax. Anyway to the large majority of Indians it would hardly matter. It’s just another name for Fair & Lovely. Fair and Glow are both four-letter words. But how the name changes the advertising need to be seen. Will the new ads have dark and glowing faces to make amends with the brand’s past? That is anybody’s guess.

     

    How Darkie changed its name

     

    It may interest people to know that the exact opposite of Fair & Lovely existed as a toothpaste in Asia many decades ago. A toothpaste called Darkie. Produced by Hawley and Hazel, the brand was very popular in Asia. The pack showed a smiling black performer. The brand was then acquired by Colgate Palmolive which faced a lot of racist flak on the brand. In 1989, Colgate Palmolive decided to change the brand name to Darlie.

     

    “It’s just plain wrong,” Reuben Mark, chairman and chief executive of Colgate-Palmolive, said about the toothpaste’s name and logotype. “It’s just offensive. The morally right thing dictated that we must change. What we have to do is find a way to change that is least damaging to the economic interests of our partners.”

     

    Seems like a shame that another global company had thought about this so deeply more than 30 years ago. So Unilever in many way is 30 years too late.

     

     What will posterity say about Fair & Lovely?

     

     But what this would mean for the generations to come is anybody’s guess.  Will Generation Alpha which may use the brand a few years from now warm up to the brand given its history? (Generation Alpha is the demographic cohort succeeding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 2010s as the starting birth years and the mid-2020s as the ending birth years.)

     

    How will these young people see our racist past? One piece of research showed that Generation Z are as racist as their millennial parents. But will this continue on to Generation Alpha? Technology is likely to change a lot of mindsets in the future. And that may change the fortune of the brand called Glow & Lovely.

     

    Prabhakar Mundkur is an advertising veteran, a lateral thinker, storyteller and musician. He has spent several years in advertising – in India and elsewhere in the world – including at JWT China where he headed the Unilever business, amongst other functions. In fact he worked on Unilever brands for a good 17 years… though never on F&S ;-). A prolific writer now, he was LinkedIn’s #1 Top Voice for 2016 and YourStory’s 100 Emerging Voices 2018. He writes frequently on MxMIndia.

  • The loss is to us all, if even reputed news organisations continue to endorse outright societal hatred and prejudice, writes Ranjona Banerji

    Is there a New York Times moment which some Indian media houses face?

     

    By Ranjona Banerji

     

    Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton which argued that the military should be used to control the unrest in the USA following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.

    This created a huge uproar, not least within the New York Times. Several journalists felt that the opinion piece sent out a dangerous message to the paper’s readers and that “objectivity” does not mean giving space to fascist or hate-filled messages.

    This is not the first time The New York Times has made mistakes nor is it the first time it has admitted to those mistakes and taken responsibility, even if you argue that it was forced to recant. Most media houses make the most egregious editorial decisions but not all have the courage to accept them, whether or not there is outrage around them. I give you, ladies and gentleman, the great Indian media trick: What you do today will be forgotten tomorrow so you can fool the people all over again.

    This is from the Editors’ Note:

    “The basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton — however objectionable people may find them — represent a newsworthy part of the current debate. But given the life-and-death importance of the topic, the senator’s influential position and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved. While Senator Cotton and his staff cooperated fully in our editing process, the Op-Ed should have been subject to further substantial revisions — as is frequently the case with such essays — or rejected.”

    The link contains the rest of the argument as to how and why the newspaper made a mistake in carrying Cotton’s essay the way it appeared:

    Part of the argument as you can see is that the USA is going through a tumultuous time. That hatred and violence against African Americans remains a clear and present danger and that racism is institutionalised. Much of the violence comes from politicians and society leaders endorsing and promoting racism, not least the President of the United States. American society cannot ignore the context in which these protests against racism have sprung up and

     

    NYT knows it cannot either.

    The Opinion editor who carried the piece, James Bennett has since resigned from the newspaper:

    https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/new-york-times-opinion-editor-resigns-after-tom-cotton-op-ed.html

    This column from the New York Times provides perspective as well as the impact of the anger within.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/tom-cotton-op-ed-new-york-times.html

    How do we compare this to India? Should we ignore the absolute hateful bilge that spews out of most of our “news” channels every day, whether in English or other languages? For some of these channels, to provoke reaction and keep the long traditions of social hatred boiling seem to be their main intention. The fact that a Hindu majoritarian country can consistently run with slogans like “Hindu khatre mein hain”, (Hindus are in danger) starkly underlines the bigotry that passes for journalism in India. Of course, there is no mirror that anyone can lift to these channels. They love what they see.

    Then there are other media outlets which are neither here nor there. They can criticise the Hindu supremacist government in a mild manner, they can make excuses for the various transgressions and incompetencies of the Narendra Modi administration. They try to be all things to all people.

    But is there a line beyond which you cannot transgress? Is there a New York Times moment which some media houses face?

    Evidently not.

    As we discussed last week, in spite of all the anger against the Islamophobic and misogynist tweets by its columnist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, and he’s not a first-time offender either, there has been no response at all either from The Print India’s founder Shekhar Gupta or from any senior editorial staff. Several Print journalists and columnists did object on Twitter but there has been no public acknowledgement of their viewpoint.

    https://thenetpaper.substack.com/p/12-journalists-tell-shekhar-gupta?fbclid=IwAR1_FstDXuml70xGBEKBpc7_7R9ruypnV4aGQugHyObloTLsDec0SK4fI8o

    Given our standards when it comes to journalism, now completely exposed ever since the BJP led by Narendra Modi came to power at the Centre, perhaps we should not be surprised. Although from the old days of those proverbial ivory towers where editors ran their little dictatorial fiefdoms, media scrutiny has increased, as we see the brazen nature of the bully has not.

    The loss is to us all, if even reputed news organisations continue to endorse outright Islamophobia, misogyny, societal hatred and prejudice. All for a few crumbs and selfies from the BJP’s high table of low standards.

     

    Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Consulting Editor, MxMIndia. Her views here are her own