Extreme Intimo case – what (not) to do when a campaign goes wrong?

This time last year, Extreme Intimo had a fundraising campaign for maternity hospitals that I defended because it seemed to me that the main "oversight" was that they did not inform the people in time about their budget for this action, so it wasn’t clear when sharing the post only helped to promote the brand. Some criticized the campaign at the time for being manipulative and, due to its mechanism, not overly advanced, but the public response was overwhelmingly positive. This year, that is not the case, and the oversights revealed the bad sides of the team that runs the brand, but let's start from the beginning...

Body positivity as a pose

The campaign itself is an already seen thing (the first thought is probably Dove) with many brands that have been trying for years to integrate the body positivity concept into their work, with more or less success. The key difference in success is made by the willingness to change your offer if you decide to change your image in this direction, or how much you are willing to invest to stand behind your own words. Dove was smart in his choice of approach because their products do not depend on this campaign, so they expanded the audience without raising their production costs. Cosmetics can be used on anybody, which is not the case with clothes.

Fashion brands generally have a bad image because their offer is often not adapted to various body types. One of the biggest problems is the size available. If you are a larger-bodied person, you will not be able to find the size for yourself and, likely, shopping will not be a pleasant experience for you, and you will have to look for a solution in brands that have sizes for you. You will also be justifiably angry if the brand that offers nothing for you decides to present itself as a body positivity brand. In that case, you practically see someone trying to profit from a story about you without offering you anything.

Here, the decision made by Extreme Intimo is revealed to be problematic and, strangely, no one thought that the campaign could cause them a problem because their offer cannot support the campaign they launched themselves.

One should not think that body positivity aims to include only people of higher weight. Last year, I wrote about a positive attitude towards the body and concluded that in our country, among brands, this issue was still not so relevant, but now is the time to return to the central problem because it knocked on our door. I will quote myself, for all those who don’t want to read the earlier text.

To correct their transgressions and/or prove inclusiveness, many brands today work with influencers and models who advocate for a positive attitude towards the body. However, often these personalities are traditionally attractive, sexualized, and with a lot of make-up. The problem is not that these personalities, mostly women, are beautified, but that the changes in the attitude towards the body are much smaller than it seems at first glance.

Women from the Extreme Intimo video are mostly thin, extremely beautiful, and, in addition, their "imperfections" such as cellulite, stretch marks, body hair... are hardly shown. The first word that comes to my mind when I see this video is polished, which is the complete opposite of the message that the campaign should convey. Indeed, the women who appear are not models, but after everything we have seen (because we do not live outside the world and the Internet), there is nothing here that pushes the boundaries in the right direction. On the contrary. If this is "recognized" as "imperfect", the question remains what is "normal" and what should we all do whose bodies look far less perfect than this. As my friend, a former copywriter, put nicely, we have developed an awareness that the look of a model is unattainable, this campaign puts us in an even worse position – it turns out that even "imperfection" is unattainable. We are even far from that. I feel the need to emphasize (although it is probably clear) that none of this is a problem of women who appear in the video, they are just there in their bodies, the problem is who is the creator of the idea and who did the casting.

Serbia and obsession with female beauty

For all those who do not want to admit it, obsession and bragging about the beauty of Serbian women is a consequence of the fact that we live in a very patriarchal environment where one of the key women's "obligations" is to be beautiful, and higher weight is not seen as a positive factor. We like to brag about how beautiful our women are and "take care of themselves". Sometimes, when we want to embarrass them, we start criticizing them for what we praised them for, and then negative attributes are attached to them that indicate that the woman is "too attractive" and that she is "abusing" her attractiveness. We know which attributes are used in such cases, there is no need to highlight them in this text.

A good example is the promo video for the new show Ona se budi (She wakes up), which will be broadcast on N1, and deals with the position of women in Serbia, gender inequality, and typified gender roles. It was released almost at the same time as the Extreme Intimo campaign so it is good to follow the reactions to get a broader picture of the public we are addressing. One of the comments on the Instagram post came, of course, from a fake profile and says: "don't let these ugly women talk about female beauty." The comment came as a reaction to the sentence of Lepa Brena, one of the participants in the show: "If you are beautiful, then they don't believe you are smart."

Why does this matter? In this cultural climate, I believe that almost no domestic brand would have the guts to show the real "imperfections" of women because they would be afraid of condemnation from their audience, both those who impose standards of beauty and those who still choose to believe they must fit those standards at all costs. That is probably why Extreme Intimo tried to play it safe but did not anticipate that it could provoke serious negative reactions because, after all, even though we live in these circumstances, it is increasingly certain that she wakes up and gets louder since she just had it enough.

SM manager horror story

Somehow the campaign has nothing to do with the products the brand has to offer. Somehow the story didn’t match the visuals. Somehow it all happened, and the brand seemed to be just waiting to pick up praise. There is no other explanation for the way they received criticism. A woman (@vanjabursac) asked them in a comment on the post if there are bigger sizes (we all know they don't exist) and called them out directly because they present themselves as a BP brand, even though no one asked them to.

The answers of the person who runs their networks are the worst example of gaslighting and attempts of shaming. However, it did not end there because they sent her a private message in the same manner and accused her of being a negative person, and that their message as a brand was positive! Along the way, they tried to explain to her what body positivity is (!) and that it doesn’t just involve larger bodies. As we have already pointed out above, this is true, but it still does not mean that the brand has shown any of that.

Vanja Bursać, as a person, has the right to be angry and her tone can be aggressive, while a person whose job it is to communicate from the company’s profile has NO RIGHT to do the same because they do not answer in their name but the name of the company.

At some point (when "negativity" became viral, and not only Vanja Bursać's problem, as the one who writes on the brand side initially tried to convince her), someone changed the approach, so they started to thank the critics for their posts and promise that it will consider changing its model offering by introducing larger numbers, and issued a public apology in the end. Probably no one on the side of the brand wanted this change, and they tried to avoid such a promise because it represents an additional cost that hits them in the head. However, things got out of hand and it was time to handle a PR crisis. The first step was probably: to get rid of the person who goes and indirectly diagnoses depression to people because he can't cope with criticism. That's not a good image for a brand. Just as it is not good for an "inclusive" brand to write something in the style of "when we already have nothing for you because you are way too big, at least buy someone a gift". The saddest thing is that this message is not very far from what was written.

What are the lessons for the future?

Don't create campaigns that you can't support with your work. Do not respond publicly to criticism with passive aggression. Nor privately. Forget about passive aggression as a response. Don't tell someone they are a negative person and that's why they don't understand you. You are not a teenager in a band, but someone who gives a voice to the brand (this rhyme is very cringeworthy and just moderately random). Don't underestimate the power of negative reactions on social networks, especially if you are caught there trying to cheat. I guess you know it doesn't work. And if brands in Serbia didn't know, here's an opportunity to learn a lesson.

And here is a lesson for us on the advertising agency side, if the client insists on something that has nothing to do with his activities, and thinks that it would improve his image, now you have a concrete example to show him why it shouldn’t be done. And whatever you do, never hire someone who doesn't understand how the internet works to run your social media channels.

Author: Natalija Jovanović, Senior Content Manager