Overleveraging..or, too much of a good thing can be bad

I applaud brands with the courage to leverage a consumer insight.
Sounds easy. And obvious. But, sadly too few brands actually do it.

There's probably a handful of reasons for this, which we'll get at in future posts, but quickly, my experience suggests it's most likely one of these 4:

a) marketer thinks brand speaks for itself; insights are for wussies. We just need logo, flash and celebrity talent.

b) marketer and/or agency uncovers insight, but they don't like it, so they come up with one they like better. unfortunately it's unlikely to resonate.

c) marketer and/or agency identifies a juicy insight, planner seeds it in the brief, creative team ignores it entirely as they get caught up making flashy ads, ad never delivers against the insight, rendering the earlier part of the process useless.

d) everything goes splendidly; then, in the eleventh hour, the client who thinks he knows exactly what the advertising SHOULD be, trashes the insight-driven ads, writes his own and tells the agency to produce it.

Enough about why insights don't get baked into the advertising. This post is about a brand that did the opposite. Indeed, they FOUND an insight, BAKED it into the advertising, and they are now undoing their earlier good by over-extending the strategy well beyond intelligible parameters.

That brand is Philips.

The insight: people (including and especially men) don't want body hair. They're trimming it off. It can be embarrassing to discuss and tricky to "do right". Check out their earlier work, which I believe was from Tribal DDB.

Enter the latest effort - some contrived linkage to deforestation?? I guess Philips wants us to know they're PRO removing your forest and AGAINST deforestation. They propose to solve the deforestation problem by planting a tree for every bodygrooming razor purchased.

Need I say more?

These are two very separate ideas that really ought not be linked. I could call green washing on this whole thing, but it doesn't seem necessary to go there.

We get it. You want to be viewed as a socially responsible company. But, really this is just too far a stretch. You had a good thing - a consumer insight, advertising and cool viral content that expressed it with some nice humor, a compelling product proposition ...and now you give us this.

I'm calling this one OFF STRATEGY.