KAO'S #BeWhite
Kao is a company that mainly produces toiletry and chemical products in Japan. In 2019, the company has run a campaign with the slogan #Bewhite on social media. One day after the release of their promotion video, Kao got many criticisms from the Twitter users.
The campaign’s slogan was soon negatively responded by the company’s employees since it sounded like racial discrimination with the hashtag #Bewhite. Initially, the campaign was aimed at encouraging family members to equitably share the household chores between each other and Kao was inspired by a Japanese term “white companies’’ to create their slogan #Bewhite. To explain, Kao wanted to motivate the awareness of gender equality among the Japanese families since in most Asia countries, especially in Japan, women are always supposed to be the ones who take responsibility for doing household chores.
To have a further understanding of the failure of the campaign, some noticeable key elements will be explained and analyzed in this essay. In Japan, “white companies” is a moniker given to those companies which treat their employees fairly and encourage the work-life balance of people. On the other hand, “black companies” is used to mention those companies that force their employees to overwork and mistreat them. As a result, Kao intended to use the slogan “BeWhite” in their campaign as a term to motivate the fairness in doing household chores and raise awareness of people on how to make a balance between their work and family’s responsibility. However, from the western countries’ point of view, the slogan term caused the contiguity to the sensitivity of the racial discrimination issues. Since Kao’s employees noticed this error, they immediately canceled the campaign and removed their video on social media. Fortunately, this prompt action has helped to reduce the damage to the company since there were not many people being aware of the existence of this campaign. But the Kao still had to face the 2.4% decrease in the company’s share in Tokyo Friday.
Despite the good research of the company about Japan’s cultural issue, Kao still has a lack of consideration towards the usage of words. Unintentionally, the term they used in campaign sparked one of the most controversial social issues which are racism. This factor remarkably affected the brand’s image and the progress of the holding campaign. According to Ryota Ogawa, a spokesman for Kao, the company thought that it would be a fun activity for people to join in the shared housework campaign but they realized that in English the term #Bewhite could be interpreted in many different meanings and it showed a lack of sensitivity.
Although the campaign was failed to be run in a longer period, it still has two pros and cons aspects. In terms of the positive aspect, the company had good research of their consumers when they found out most of the housewives do not feel fair and comfortable when they had to always be responsible for the household chores without the help and support from other family members. Besides, the company also thinks of the idea that those “white companies” often treat their employees well and give them opportunities to have time for family. In contrast, the campaign’s failure is still a fact that some points need to be noticed and improved in this campaign’s performance such as the usage of words should be strictly considered whether it was related to any diversity issues or not. Since there were many similar cases in the advertising industry facing failure when the contents were related to sensitive topics, this kind of error wouldn’t be accepted. For instance, according to the page South China Morning Post, in 2016, Leishang Cosmetics cosmetic company ran a commercial campaign on social media for Qiaobi laundry detergent. In the video, to emphasize the functional quality of the product, an Asian woman is pushing the Black man into a washing machine to “clean” himself then when it finished, an Asian man with a lighter skin color comes out of the machine. After the ads went viral in other countries, the company soon gained much negative feedback from the internet users and the media.
Vietnam is also one of the Asia countries having the out-dated perspective about the role of women and men in a family. Therefore, the core value of the campaign could be run well in Vietnam. Nevertheless, in order to approach the audience without showing any racism message to the society, the words used to create the slogan need to be changed to a more appropriate term such as #sechiaviecnha (“share the household chores”).
In conclusion, the campaign was not well prepared and evaluated before being published and run on the internet. This was such a worthy experience for Kao to perform better in the future. However, it is considered to be a potential campaign to be held in Vietnam since Japan and Vietnam have many similar cultural perspectives among the people.