Follow up to the whole Dockers thing

[deathpixie]

So, a week or so after emailing them, I finally got a reply from someone:

Hi,

Samantha here from Dockers(R). Thanks for checking in with us.

The Dockers(r) "Wear The Pants" campaign is intended to give men a reason to love their khakis, the focus of this campaign. We apologize if our efforts did not resonate with you.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. We'll definitely pass them along to our Marketing colleagues who pay close attention to consumer feedback.

If there's anything else we can help you with, just email us back or give us a call at 1-800-DOCKERS. We're available Monday - Friday, 6:00am - 4:30pm Pacific Time.

Thanks again,

Samantha
Levi Strauss & Co.
Consumer Relations

*rolls eyes* So they're trying to give men a "reason to love their khakis" by telling them that without them, they're androgynous wussy boys with no power and the world is going to hell for want of a strong (male) hand at the helm. Bite me, Dockers.

Also, if people want to add their comments, since Marketing pays such close attention to public feedback, the email address is: info@dockers.com

Comments

[technophobia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I smell form letter. Disappointing.

[blinkytreefrog.livejournal.com]

I smell form letter that is very emphatic about being from 'Samantha'. Because see, she's a girl so it can't be sexist ;-).

[jbmcdragon.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I've emailed, too, and I'll put it out there. Hopefully someone will notice. :P

J

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

I wish I could be surprised at the response. :/

[dreamchain17.livejournal.com]

Hi, found your journal off the Roleplayers' community's friends list, hope this isn't an intrusion.

I'd actually be curious to see what you wrote them so I can contextually figure out what exactly their response means.

[acetal.livejournal.com]

Their response from Samantha means that they've got a lot of complaints from women (and perhaps men too) and have generated a form letter as a result to answer them all. From Samantha.

Their response means that nobody in marketing is going to read the email.

[deathpixie]

No intrusion. :)

Here's what I sent:

To Whom It May Concern:

I live in Toronto and I am a daily reader of the Metro. I am writing to express my discomfort with the advertisement for Dockers khakis, found on the inside front cover of today's (Monday, March 8, 2010) newspaper. To be explicit, this copy printed as the shape of a man's torso 'wearing' the aforementioned khakis:

Once upon a time, men wore the pants, and wore them well. Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone. Men took charge because that's what they did. But somewhere along the way, the world decided it no longer needed men. Disco by disco, latte by foamy non-fat latte, men were stripped of their khakis and left stranded on the road btween boyhood and androgyny. But today, there are questions our genderless society has no answers for. The world sits idly by as cities crumble, children misbehave and those little old ladies remain on one side of the street. For the first time since bad guys, we need heroes. We need grown-ups. We need men to put down the plastic fork, step away from the salad bar and untie the world from the tracks of complacency. It's time to get your hands dirty. It's time to answer the call of manhood. It's time to WEAR THE PANTS.

This would be bad enough any day. For it to be the cover advertisement of the Metro, one of the biggest free newspapers, on International Women's Day is bordering on tragic irony. Once again the media is blaming feminism for the emasculation of men and has decided the world is a worse-off place for it. It's wonderful to know that today's world, because women no longer wait for men to rescue them, can be considered weak, childish and going to hell in a handbasket, our civilisation crumbling because men are no longer "able to take charge".

I will not be purchasing Docker's or Levi Strauss and I will be encouraging my friends to do the same. Nor will I be picking up the Metro newspaper in future. I would hope, in a world that has progressed past the sexism of the fifties, you'd be able to see the insult given in this particular advertising angle, not only to women, but to those men who strive to be more than beer-swilling, sports-watching cavemen.

Sincerely,

[dreamchain17.livejournal.com]

I just don't think it's very likely they've gotten enough gender-specific complaints that they created a form letter to deal with it. o.O For the most part media doesn't seem to CARE about gender roles and how they're perceived, and the general public is too apathetic to write in about it. Isn't it more likely they just have an ACTUAL female working for them who either received this at the point of complaint (there's usually a lot of women in customer service) or they actually referred it to her because "Oh look. A woman's writing. Better have a woman write back."

Of course there is an empirical way to test this.

[dreamchain17.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

Yeah I don't know. It's hard to read context in letters like that. ARE you or any of your friends going to be following up?

[deathpixie]

[Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] has reposted in her journal and emailed Docker's, plus asked more people to do so. I've also posted to my Facebook, asking people to email and then pass the message on. I'll probably look at setting up a group tonight (since I can't access Facebook from work) basically asking people to sign up and then email the company and/or boycott them, based on their issues (if they have them, obviously!).

I've also not picked up the Metro since then, and while I haven't been shopping for pants, LeviStrauss is off the list of brands I'll buy.

Doing as much as one person can, and hoping that people do the same. I don't see a lot of point calling them back, but I do think encouraging more people to complain will get their attention and drive it home that it's a crappy campaign to be running.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

It's a form letter. I got the exact same response when I wrote them a couple of months ago.

[dreamchain17.livejournal.com]

Well, while I don't have the mental energy to contribute to running around with this (I should probably be working on health care if I have free time), I DO need to buy jeans in the next week or two for week, so I'll make sure to avoid them this time. Thanks for the tip.