RebelDad

What We Learned from the Pampers Boycott

Posted on 14. May, 2010 by Brian Reid in Uncategorized

My mini-obsession with bringing down Pampers this week has taken away from the usual dad-centric programming that you all know and love, so I’m shelving the boycott posts for now (don’t get me wrong: I’m still boycotting. I’m just not going to continually post on it). But I did garner three insights this week that I think are worth sharing:

1. You guys are awesome. Scores of you “liked” Pampers posts. A handful of you linked to me. And more than a dozen tweets — reaching nearly 10,000 — ended up with the #pampersboycott hashtag. Nicely done, folks.
2. Proctor & Gamble doesn’t care. According to Ad Age, P&G has four people whose job it is to monitor for online chatter as part of their public-relations rapid-response effort. Now, maybe we’re not big enough fish for them to worry about. Maybe complaints about gender-specific advertising are seen as silly. Maybe they’re working 24/7 to deal with the (admittedly) bigger PR problem around chemical burns. Whatever the reason, I haven’t heard a peep out of P&G. Not that I expected to.
3. A lot of you are massively brand loyal to your diapers. Reading through tweets, comments and my e-mail, there are plenty of you who would boycott Pampers in a second … if you didn’t think that they were the only brand that works for your kid. Funny how that works. We were that way until kid #2, when we switched to generic diapers and never looked back.

Please know that even if I’m not posting on this, I’m still down with the cause. How down with the cause am I? In addition to refusing to buy Pampers, I am extending my boycott to hit P&G where it really hurts: I will no longer buy LashBlast mascara. And to show I’m serious, I’m also going to stop watching romantic comedies starring LashBlast spokesperson Drew Barrymore. Maybe Drew can amp up the pressure on those guys in Cincinatti.

All this because Pampers doesn’t believe that dads do diapers.