WHAT'S THE POINT OF DR SQUATCH?
How Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater indicates a fresh breath of air at Unilever
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Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss is a medium grit exfoliating soap made with sand, pine bark extract and "yes, a touch of Sydney’s real bathwater." As for what it smells like, the soap bar delivers notes of pine, Douglas fir and earthy moss that brings users to the forest, as well as Sweeney's actual bathtub.
Anxious Gen Z marketers and Feminists of LinkedIn are passing the smelling salts round. Unilever has recently acquired ‘controversial’ US-based men’s grooming brand Dr Squatch.
Recently contacted by Cosmetics Business for comment I didn’t hold back.
“What’s not to like for Unilever? Dr Squatch is a unicorn. Far from being a startup, the brand was founded in 2013 and has almost doubled revenue every year in the last 5 years to reach $400m in 2024. The odds against that kind of performance in the beauty category are sadly very, very high. Like my alma mater P&G, Unilever doesn’t have the entrepreneurial instincts to create brands like Dr Squatch, but it knows a strong buy when it sees one. And Unilever should be able to leverage distribution and marketing reach for the brand, but it must also preserve its distinct character.”
Of course what makes the acquisition really interesting is the obvious flight from policy on ‘Brand Purpose’. When Alan Jope, Unilever CEO announced in 2019 that “Brands without purpose had no long-term future at Unilever” it turned out that they would have but he wouldn’t. When Hein Schumacher replaced Alan Jope in 2023 he described brand purpose as an “unwelcome distraction” that may have “diluted efforts” in terms of a focus on financial performance. Recently skewered by writers like Nick Asbury in his seminal Road to Hell book, the purpose ideology seems to be clearly on its last legs. Good riddance.
The growth and sale of Dr Squatch is living proof of the vacuity of brand purpose ideology. It is exquisitely ironic that the growth of the brand (under the radar for many marketers possibly uncomfortable with its success) coincided with peak woke in the marketing community, peak brand purpose and peak consumer dissatisfaction with ads, and in particular their humourless preaching on the unrelated ‘progressive’ issues they had jumped on.
It's ironic that while many marketers were busy using their brand’s marketing budgets to affiliate the brands they were working on with their own favourite causes like BLM, ‘Climate Justice’ and ‘LGBTQ+ Equality’, American males were switching to an irreverent brand that entertained them with its likeable, quirky and down-to-earth sense of humour.
It tells you a lot about the type of modern marketer that Dr. Squatch is widely called ‘controversial’ in marketing circles. Brands throwing money at BLM (and then quietly removing all references to it – looking at you Coca Cola) or campaigning against Israel? Nothing controversial there. But referring to bathwater in a marketing campaign? Sickeningly hateful.
But not according to consumers who as we know – don’t think like marketers. Pull’s own research showed the majority of consumers don’t actually want brands to support woke causes, they want them to ‘Pay their taxes, treat people fairly and respect the environment’
Dr Squatch also grew strongly at the time of both P&G’s $7bn act of self-harm and also Budweiser’s. When Gillette decided to campaign on the idea of ‘countering toxic masculinity’ they deployed a humourless video depicting men doing what only men can do – and can be stopped by a razor brand’s hectoring of course – behaving badly. (Can you imagine a female sanitary product campaign using a film created by a man urging women to ‘Quit the bitchin’?)
No, Dr Squatch succeeded by appealing to ‘Budweiser man’. That is Budweiser man as he existed when the brand made this masterful ‘Wassup’ ad in 1999 (and in truth probably existed in 2023 too if they had looked at their research).
Yes it was about the bros, but it was funny, emotionally engaging and for the time – diverse. But then Bud VP of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid decided in 2023 that “You've got to see people who reflect you in the work . . .” I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out of touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
A kind of humour of course that appealed to Bud buyers, and that she as a progressive female millennial didn’t like (I don’t think she really liked Bud buyers either). What she decided Bud buyers wanted to see was a transgender influencer with all the appearance of an adolescent girl drinking Bud in a bubble bath. Whatever the correct morals of the ensuing fiasco are, the damage done to sales was in the $billions. Bud sales in Jan 2025 were down 30% year on year. I’m not sure they can recover.
This is why Dr Squatch is a breath of fresh air. It’s irreverent, funny and entertaining and that makes it distinct today. I once pointed out that the role of all beauty product brands is really to make their buyers – mostly women – feel good about themselves. Dr Squatch does the same thing for many men. It’s humour is really only edgy because of the puritanical times we now live in. But Dr Squatch gets that and exploits it well. I’ll drink to that (but obviously not drink the bathwater – that would be disgusting. . .).