South Africa Women’s Day was celebrated recently with plenty of top brands getting in on the publicity by publishing “empowering” posts on social media.
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However, Facebook users were not all accepting of Bic’s apology. Bic had initially defended commercial that exhibits a smiling lady in a enterprise go well with, beside the slogan: “Appear to be a woman, act like a woman, assume like a person, act like a boss”.
Back in 2012, it was nearly universally mocked when it launched a line of pens for women called Bic For Her.
A lot of people pointed out that while the company has apologised, it seemed to have missed the point – ironically so. Its not the first incident the company have been blasted for in regards to their sexist behaviour, how can we forget the time they created those ballpoint pens for her because our lady hands couldnt handle their manlier versions?
Best known for making pens, the firm has attracted opprobrium this time with an “empowering” advert intended to celebrate Women’s Day in South Africa – telling women to dress like girls and think like men.
Sarah Taylor, the author of the Women In Business blog post, explained the meaning behind the message.
“Hi everyone. Let’s start out by saying we’re incredibly sorry for offending everybody – that was never our intention, but we completely understand where we’ve gone wrong”.
In its apology posted on Facebook on August 11, Bic South Africa acknowledged the error and ensured customers that “something like this will never happen again”.
“To be honest, I think we need to stop focusing on these ads”.
“What fresh [expletive] is this?” she said, and then: “seriously?”
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“It comes across as quite matter of fact”, she says. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres lampooned the company on her show, joking that “the worst part is they don’t come with any instructions, so how do they expect us to learn how to write with ’em, you know?”
