GrabCar's 'Love Boobs' campaign fiasco shows why context is as important as content
COMMENTARY BY MARC LOURDES
The most interesting thing about GrabCar’s ill-fated breast cancer awareness campaign fiasco is that, unlike most PR boo-boos, it hasn’t drawn universal condemnation.
While there have been many people who’ve slammed the campaign for being insensitive and offensive, the programme has also drawn quite a bit of support.
For example, writer and social media personality Zara Kahan, on Twitter, labeled the ‘Love Boobs’ campaign "so tone deaf it’s terrifying" and slammed the campaign’s accompanying video as “terrible" for characterising people who have mastectomies as "ugly and worth less”.
An article by The Malay Mail Online also compiled other outraged reactions on social media; people hammered the campaign, calling it “sexist”, “objectifying” and “distasteful”.
However, “Love Boobs” has also had its fair share of support, notably from Marketing-Interactive writer Rezwana Manjur, who questioned if GrabCar even needed to apologize for the campaign, which they did soon after the angry social media outburst. She quoted PR practitioner Sonya Madeira, who even called it "a win for GrabTaxi” since the company managed to “cut through the clutter and get people talking”.
There are several things wrong with its execution (including the in-your-face app push notification, above), but the campaign was ambitious and - dare I say it? - even noble. It included:
GrabCar vehicles offering discounted rides for women to go to breast cancer screening clinics.
A roving breast cancer awareness truck, giving women free examinations.
Tips of conducting self-examinations.
T-shirts to raise funds for cancer.
GrabCar vehicles swathed in pink, the color of breast cancer awareness.
A host of celebrity endorsers, including Marina Mahathir, Jinny Boy and Daphne Iking.
And then they went and framed this - I’ll say it again - noble intention in a way that made people cringe: “Love Boobs”. You can almost hear the frat boys giggling into their beer as they came up with that particular pearl of a message.
These are the problems with the “Love Boobs” campaign:
For an affliction that hits mostly women, the message was delivered in the most laddish of manners. The proposition of “loving boobs” is primarily a guy thing and implies a sexual context; to a woman, breasts are a part of her anatomy and loved as much as every other part of the body.
Words like “boobs” are still not usually used in polite conversation in Asia. Some argue that not using such words shows that, as a society, we’re still not comfortable with the topic of sexuality, especially women’s sexuality. These people miss the point. It’s not the issue of sexuality that make many people shy away - it’s simply the crudeness of the language used. It’s not the kind of word most of us would use in front of our parents.
Made by Malaysian production house Grim Film, the video that accompanied the campaign featured scantily-clad women, who were replaced by men to illustrate a world where “breasts don’t exist”. It trivialised a life-threatening illness, objectified women and was just generally distasteful. That the makers took down the video and that GrabCar dropped its association to the video like a hot potato is good indication that they too realised, belatedly, how insensitive it was.
If the #GrabItBeatIt hashtag was somebody's idea of humour, wit or sly wordplay on the "grab" from "GrabCar", it failed on all accounts. "Grab", "beat" and "boobs" in the same context creates all the wrong sorts of word associations and, again, just smacks of laddish humour.
The real tragedy of this PR nightmare is that the original intent and message has been submerged in the firestorm that has arisen due to the simple fact that GrabCar missed the obvious social, gender and cultural nuances and context that they needed to understand before going ahead with this ill-conceived idea.
Marc Lourdes is Yahoo Singapore's editor-in-chief. Follow him on Twitter: @marclourdes
