Axe & Dove

Should we care about the CSR performance of Unilever's brand Axe when considering Unilever's brand Dove?

A while ago my friend Isaac posted a great review about Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer goods conglomerate. He was inspired by an interesting YouTube video about Unilever's brands Dove and Axe, and claimed that the video demonstrates the "cynical paradigm of Unilever and other corporations that use positive social messages only when it's profitable."

Isaac summed up the video nicely:

"The gist of it is that Unilever owns both Dove and Axe. The recent Dove advertising campaign seems to be at least making steps towards a less harmful ideal of the feminine physique (e.g. the "Dove Evolution" commercial, also on YouTube). But this is undermined by Axe advertisements, which are impressively demeaning towards women. (Even if you find them entertaining, it's probably not the worldview you'd want to bequeath to your daughter.) And Unilever sells more products inasmuch as consumers believe the people behind Dove actually care about addressing body image issues in our society...

... there are worse things than being a hypocrite. Maybe we shouldn't expect corporations not to play both sides when there's money to be made. But there is real damage done here: it gives cause for cynicism and suspicion whenever anyone looks like they're doing a good thing."

Isaac's review illustrates a tricky question about how our team at Citizens Market should structure the scores for the social and environmental performance of brands and companies in our database. We'd love to hear what you think.

One option is to post a separate score for each brand, even if multiple brands are owned by a single parent company. A search for "Axe" would take the user to a profile page for Axe with a unique score for Axe. A search for "Dove" would lead to the Dove profile page with a different score for Dove. Both the Axe and Dove pages would notify the user that the brand is owned by Unilever, which would have yet another score combining Axe, Dove and all its other brands. Let's call this the "brand score" option.

Another option is to post only one score for the parent company, where all brands owned by a company inherit its score. A search for "Axe" would take the user to the Unilever profile page with Unilever's score, with an explanation that Axe is owned by Unilever. Same thing for Dove. Let's call this the "parent company score" option.

As a potential user of our scores, what would you prefer? Some folks like the nuance of the "brand score" option, reasoning that this will empower users with more information and create more incentive for individual brand teams to improve their social and environmental performance. Other folks want to stay focused on the overall performance of the parent company, arguing that laggard brands like Axe will receive more pressure from peer brands and corporate headquarters, and that parent company scores are the best way to battle the hypocrisy evident in the Axe-Dove case.

From a pragmatic perspective, it is certainly easier for us to pursue the "parent company score" option because there are fewer unique profiles and scores involved, and fewer interactive levels between scores. That means a lot less work for our crowdsourced information contributors and our in-house web developers. Therefore, we'll start with the "parent company score" option as we develop our website and community. But with time it may make sense to get more granular and turn to the "brand score" option. And in that case we'd want to start planning now.

We'd love to hear what you think and why. Should we stick with just one score for the parent company and all its brands? Or should we delve into different scores for different brands within a company?

- Stephane