Posted by The Present Minds • February 10, 2026 • Reviews
The best a man can get (unless he objects)
The Gillette ad backlash began with a sound most men recognise.
There’s a specific sound a Gillette makes when you tap it against the sink. That metallic ring, the water running through the blades, carrying away foam and stubble into the drain. If you grew up watching your father shave in the morning, you know that sound. It meant routines. Getting ready for work. The bathroom mirror fogging up. The smell of shaving cream and aftershave mixing into something that just meant morning.
Gillette wasn’t a choice. It was what was there. In every medicine cabinet, every drugstore shelf, every gas station bathroom. The blue packaging felt permanent the way certain brands do when they’ve existed longer than you have. Your grandfather used it. Your father used it. You used it. That’s just what you did.
Then in January 2019, Gillette released a 90-second ad, and within 48 hours, men were posting photos of their razors in the trash.
The video was called “The Best Men Can Be,” a twist on the tagline that had been running since 1989. It opened with news clips about #MeToo and Terry Crews talking about toxic masculinity. Then came the montage: boys fighting while fathers grilled and shrugged. Men catcalling women on the street. Bullying. Aggression. A line of fathers standing behind barbecues repeating “boys will be boys” like a Greek chorus of low expectations.
Only in the final third did the ad pivot. Men stepping in. Stopping fights. Protecting. Mentoring. The message seemed simple enough: be better than this.
Four hundred thousand people disliked it within two days. Boycott hashtags trended in twelve countries. Comment sections filled with the kind of rage that only comes when something familiar suddenly asks you to justify yourself. Six months later, Procter & Gamble announced an $8 billion writedown on the Gillette brand. By 2023, total losses associated with the decline had hit $9.3 billion.
Leadership called it a price worth paying. Customers called it a reason to leave. And somewhere in that gap between intention and reception, one of the most dominant brands in consumer history learned that not every conversation is worth having with a razor in your hand.
When sharpness was enough
King Camp Gillette invented the safety razor in 1901, but the genius wasn’t the blade. It was the business model. Sell the handle cheap, make the profit on replacements. By the 1950s, Gillette controlled 70% of the global market. The product was utilitarian. The branding was aspirational. Ads showed fighter pilots, Olympic athletes, men with clean jawlines heading somewhere important. “The best a man can get” wasn’t a question. It was a statement that felt true because everyone already believed it.
That kind of market dominance doesn’t come from better engineering alone. It comes from becoming invisible infrastructure. Gillette was in every bathroom, every convenience store, every hotel amenity kit. Switching required effort, and razors were cheap enough that effort felt wasteful. The brand didn’t need to convince you of anything. It was already there.
But by 2018, the ground was shifting. Beards had come back, not as rebellion but as mainstream grooming. Fewer men shaved daily, which meant fewer replacement blades. Then came Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s, subscription services that shipped razors to your door for half the price. Dollar Shave Club’s 2012 launch video went viral with the line “Our blades are f***ing great”—funny, blunt, and suddenly Gillette looked like your father’s overpriced habit.
Market share started bleeding. Not catastrophically, but steadily. The problem wasn’t just cheaper alternatives. It was relevance. The brand that had defined masculinity for generations now looked like it belonged to the past. And in a market where younger consumers wanted brands that stood for something beyond product features, Gillette’s decades of hypermasculine imagery felt increasingly out of step.
Inside Procter & Gamble, the question wasn’t whether to modernize. It was how.
The ad that mistook attention for loyalty
In 2019, purpose-driven marketing was the strategy. Nike had run Colin Kaepernick’s face with “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” and saw sales spike despite boycott threats. Patagonia was winning loyalty by suing the U.S. government over public lands. The logic seemed clear: younger consumers wanted brands with values, not just products.
Gillette saw an opening. The #MeToo movement was reshaping conversations about power and masculinity. The brand’s own tagline—”The best a man can get”—suddenly carried weight it hadn’t before. What if they leaned into that? What if they became part of the solution?
The resulting commercial, directed by Kim Gehrig, opened with a grid of men staring into mirrors while a voiceover asked, “Is this the best a man can get?” For the next 60 seconds, the camera stayed on negative behavior. Bullying in schoolyards. Harassment at work. Aggression played off as normal. News clips about misconduct. A long line of men behind barbecues saying “boys will be boys” while kids fought in the background.
Then, in the final 30 seconds, the tone shifted. Men intervened. Stopped fights. Mentored boys. Protected women. The closing line urged viewers to act because “the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow.”
The Gillette controversy erupted immediately. For many viewers, the ad didn’t feel like inspiration. It felt like an accusation. Traditional customers, men who’d been buying Gillette for decades, felt lectured by the brand that had been sitting in their bathroom since childhood. The hypocrisy stung: Gillette had spent a century selling masculinity through images of strength, athleticism, and dominance. Now, during a cultural flashpoint guaranteed to generate attention, they were pivoting to critique that same masculinity.
The backlash wasn’t just disagreement. It was visceral. Men announced they were switching to Schick. To Harry’s. To anything that wasn’t going to treat them like a problem to be solved.
What complicates the story is that plenty of people loved the ad. Women shared it. Younger men praised it. Think pieces defended it as brave and necessary. The ad won awards. But the people celebrating weren’t the people buying. Meanwhile, the core customer base—middle-aged men who had been using Gillette for decades—was walking out.
Awareness isn’t loyalty. Applause isn’t revenue. And by the time Gillette realized the difference, the damage was done.
The defense that couldn’t match the math
Six months after the ad launched, Procter & Gamble announced an $8 billion writedown. Executives blamed currency fluctuations and market pressures. They did not blame the ad directly. Publicly, leadership doubled down. Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer, told an industry conference that the backlash came from “a small but vocal minority” and that it was “a price worth paying” to build long-term loyalty with a new generation.
That phrase “price worth paying” sits uncomfortably against $8 billion in losses. If the backlash was truly a minority, why did the financial impact look so widespread? And if the goal was winning younger consumers, why didn’t the sales data show it? By 2023, accumulated losses tied to Gillette’s decline had reached $9.3 billion. The brand quietly pivoted back to traditional advertising. Firefighters. Fathers teaching sons to shave. Local heroes. The social commentary disappeared.
There are multiple ways to interpret what happened. Maybe Gillette misjudged its audience. Maybe the execution was clumsy, even if the intent was sound. Maybe razors are fundamentally utilitarian, and customers don’t want moral instruction packaged with replacement blades.
But there’s a harder question that doesn’t resolve. Would Gillette have lost those billions anyway, as beards grew popular and Dollar Shave Club ate market share? Or did the ad accelerate a decline that was already in motion? And if leadership truly believed the strategy was right, why did they abandon it so completely when the numbers came in?
The ad is still on YouTube. The dislikes are still there. The customers who left didn’t come back. And somewhere in a boardroom, someone is probably still defending the decision, still insisting the math will eventually prove them right, still calling it a price worth paying.
But the price keeps going up, and the customers keep staying gone.
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