Rebranding Pigmentocracy: Analyzing Marketing Strategies of Unilever’s Skin Lightening Products

Abstract

This paper examines the trajectory of Hindustan Unilever—a subsidiary of the UK-based consumer goods giant—and its video advertisements for skin lightening products over the past 15 years, critiquing the company’s rebranding of Fair & Lovely to Glow & Lovely. Prior to its rebranding in 2020, Unilever’s Fair & Lovely regularly promoted skin-bleaching products by emphasising the disadvantages associated with darker skin, including fewer marriage prospects and a lack of employment opportunities. Due to increasing public criticisms, Glow & Lovely’s rebranding attempts to convey outward racial sensitivity by moving away from highlighting the benefits of “fairness” and instead shifting focus to healthy skin that Unilever characterizes as “glowing, radiant, and even.” However, discourse analysis of commercials explores the ways in which both social disadvantages and advantages related to skin colour—such as the so-called “pretty privilege” associated with lighter skin—are still exploited through problematic narratives, meanings and representations. In short, the discourse analysis reveals that despite its rebranding, Unilever continues to rely on the logic of western-based racial and gender ideals for its marketing campaigns. In an effort to downplay the pigmentocratic implications, a spurious importance on gender equality is also utilized in the new marketing material, revealing changing meanings across the past 15-year timespan of the brand. Indeed, the intersectional analysis sheds light on how Unilever’s advertisements claim to promote gender and racial inclusivity, yet instead function to promote longstanding inequalities.