P&G's Gillette Venus seeks to normalize pubic hair with quirky tune

Dive Brief:

Gillette Venus has released a song and animated video on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to promote its new Venus for Pubic Hair & Skin Collection. "The Pube Song" aims to normalize and destigmatize female pubic grooming, per a press release.
The P&G brand is encouraging women to "#SayPubic" as part of the effort, which seeks to close the gap between the almost-half of U.S. women that feel anatomical terms like pubic are more accurate and the 18% of women that actually use those terms, per a survey by the brand.
Similarly, 54% of U.S. women say society has defined what is visually appealing with regards to women's pubic grooming, while 56% wish there were more accurate descriptions and imagery in society of pubic grooming. The effort to normalize such terms and images mirrors that of direct-to-consumer (DTC) razor brand Billie, which P&G tried to acquire before an FTC antitrust complaint caused the companies to call off the deal.

Dive Insight:

The Gillette Venus brand is bringing P&G's commitment to portraying more realistic depictions of women and their bodies to the hair grooming space by promoting a new product line with a quirky song and video that resembles classic animated musical numbers. The push comes amid research by the company that suggests that both the products and marketing around pubic grooming are unsatisfactory. While 84% of U.S. women remove at least some of their pubic hair, 87% of them are dissatisfied with the results, per a 2019 survey by P&G.

"With over two decades of research and scientific development in women’s hair and skin under our belt, literally, we know that grooming means something different to every woman," MyAnh Nghiem, communications director for Gillette Venus, said in the press release. "Our new collection not only offers women more options for pubic grooming than we ever have before, but starts a new conversation about using language that accurately and respectfully represents the female body."

The Gillette Venus #SayPubic campaign follows similar efforts by DTC razor brand Billie. The female-focused brand launched its crowd-sourced "Project Body Hair" campaign in 2018, which it followed with a video campaign the next summer. P&G announced an acquisition of Billie in 2020 but called off the deal in January 2021 after the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust complaint. With this campaign, the brand can tap into the same type of conversations that Billie spurred several years ago — without having to acquire the company.

The product and campaign also seek to boost Gillette Venus' and P&G's larger DTC efforts. Venus offers a razor subscription model utilized by Billie and Dollar Shave Club, and the new Pubic Hair & Skin Starter Kit is already sold-out online, as of press time. DTC e-commerce allows CPG brands like P&G direct relationships with consumers, and can yield first-party data that is becoming increasingly important to marketers like P&G.

"Consumers trust our brands, and we aim to ensure that the data that they choose to share with us will be used in ways that they prefer," Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said at CES in January.