This being the Responsible Marketing Blog, you might think a video with an F-Bomb in it might attract our ire, right? Wrong. Watch this:
There are plenty of things we don’t like: Racism. Bigotry. Violence. Corporate greed run amok. Comic sans.
But boring marketing is irresponsible, and boring Dollar Shave Club is not.
This is f**king brilliant.
This ad is despicable! Who cares if they drop an f-bomb, but how dare they poke fun at polio. I’ve watched the ad several times and it makes fun of several things that are worth making fun of… like “who needs a razor with 10 blades,” for example. But to mock people who survived polio … “your good-looking grandfather, blah, blah.. and he had polio” is uncalled for. When my father was stricken with polio he was crippled and bed-ridden for 13 months when he was 12-13 years old.. He lived in a small rural community and when he finally could crawl out of bed, he continued to crawl out the back of his family property, across a small foot bridge and over 3 sets of railroad tracks just so he could go to school and resume a normal life. Then, 50 years later he was stricken with similar symptoms and again nearly died. A neighbor of ours was also a polio survivor, but not as fortunate. He was never able to walk without crutches and when post polio syndrome struck he was confined to a wheelchair.
For these people to ruin an otherwise clever ad campaign with such a lowly cheap shot at people who suffered so much is uncalled for. No one should buy their products until they apologize and this campaign is taken off the air.
I keep seeing people post stuff like this anytime DSC is mentioned but I just don’t get it. I don’t think they are making fun of polio. They are stating that your grandfather had polio and one razor and he was fine. I’m not trying to defend DSC in any ways as honestly, I was not impressed with their blades.