Why Some Brands Are Roasting Themselves

Luggage brand Béis’s latest marketing campaign is putting its haters in the spotlight.

“Lol the Weekender is indeed going to rip your shoulder to shreds if carried by itself,” founder Shay Mitchell read aloud in an Instagram reel earlier this month, citing a recent customer comment about Béis’s hero product, the Weekender bag.

The video was part of a summer campaign rooted in addressing consumer feedback around ease of packing, comfort and accessibility. The goal was to highlight that the brand was listening to its customers’ pain points and taking action to resolve them — namely, by redesigning its products, Mitchell told The Business of Fashion. The accompanying campaign featured Mitchell dressed up as a surgeon, marking up the Weekender bag as though it’s a plastic surgery patient.

Self-deprecation isn’t a new tactic in marketing. Fast food restaurants have long created ads highlighting criticism, such as Domino’s Pizza’s 2009 campaign that spotlighted online comments about the chain’s pizza tasting like cardboard, and then depicting their chefs getting to work in the kitchen to improve its recipes.

While fashion has been slow to keep up, it’s become harder to ignore negative commentary on Instagram and Reddit, where every misstep can become a viral spectacle. As a result, brands like Béis are starting to use flak to their advantage. In a February campaign, Dove published unedited Reddit reviews from real users as part of a campaign to promote its new 10-in-1 hair repair mask, including positive comments and not so flattering ones too, like “I hate the smell, it’s like an old lady, wearing too much intense perfume smell.”

For brands like Dove and Béis, acknowledging criticism is not only a method of neutralising comments by being able to laugh at themselves alongside customers but also a way to show that they are paying attention to what people have to say.

“Reading the comments, the good, the bad, the ugly … they are really great feedback, and I think that is what we’ve done with Béis so well is truly have that two-way conversation open up with our consumers,” said Mitchell. “I’m literally building it with you … Tell me what you would like to see improve.”

Engaging with critics, however, can be tricky. While some comments may serve as genuine feedback, online forums are rife with trolls. Even among constructive feedback, brands should only take into consideration issues that they can address head-on.

“You’re not going to choose to make light of a really deep moral or ethical failure on behalf of the brand,” said Ellie Bamford, chief strategy officer for North America at creative agency VML. “You’re going to lean into something that you can actually resolve to the consumer’s advantage, or you lean into a perception that you’re actually wanting to evolve.”

If brands do identify an issue worth acknowledging — as long as it hasn’t caused real harm to shoppers — a little bit of self-deprecation and a sense of humour serve as a way to build trust.

“[Customers] then feel like, oh, I’m actually being considered, and they’re actually making something for me,” said Elizabeth Tan, senior culture strategist at trend forecasting agency WGSN.

Self-Awareness Over Self-Consciousness

In the age of AI, a company’s ability to poke fun at itself can go a long way.

“People are more sceptical than they’ve ever been before,” said Bamford. “A brand that says, ‘We’re not perfect, we get it wrong sometimes but we want to change,’ [is] instantly more desirable than a brand that’s got this shiny facade.”

Dove’s Reddit campaign goes a step further, leveraging actual reviews to drum up buzz about a recently released product while also highlighting its longstanding ethos of being real and honest. And by stirring additional chatter on Reddit, where a conversation about the brand’s hair mask had already started to percolate organically, the brand also ended up surfacing more frequently on AI search engines like ChatGPT, which use Reddit as a frequently cited source for its honest, human reviews.

“We had to make sure that we did not come across as pushing a particular statement when approaching the Redditor community because if you try to shape and curate the conversation, they know,” said Emily Barfoot, head of hair and skin for Dove US. “[Brands] want to show up really curated … And we had to kind of let that go.”

The Dove campaign also tapped into Gen Z’s desire to feel like they are behind the scenes and participating with a brand, rather than just being presented with a final, polished advertisement.

“It’s very meta, and I think that’s what gets Gen Z specifically,” said Tan. “It adds a layer of [having] real humans, it’s not just the dead internet with bots adding comments on your product.”

A Re-Education Opportunity

Humour is also an effective tool for educating consumers that may have misconceptions about a brand and its products. For the Béis Weekender bag relaunch, for instance, Mitchell and her team wanted to highlight the fact that the bag is designed to slide onto a rolling suitcase for enhanced ease, which some of its shoppers may not have known, while its Mini Weekender can more easily be carried as a personal item, sans roller luggage.

“We’ve always had our two sizes,” said Mitchell. “Being able to do it again in a new, refreshed way of messaging was also helpful this time.”

British high street retailer Primark also used self-deprecation as a means of de-fanging consumer biases about it not being particularly fashion-forward. Its March campaign, titled “Shockingly Chic,” showed models feigning shock that trendy Primark pieces were so accessibly priced. Being in on the joke that Primark is not known for being a trendsetting retailer was more effective than trying to force a polished image of themselves as a trendy brand upon consumers.

“There is a difference between being desirable and being perfect,” said Bamford. “You need to be able to connect with people, whether you’re selling a $5,000 handbag or a $50 shirt from Primark.”