Marketing and Ethics (united Colors of Benetton)

Often regarded as a leader in the multinational marketing industry, United Colors of Benetton continues to face the challenge of effectively marketing clothes across racial, cultural, and religious borders. Renowned for using social issued-themed pictures to promote its brand, Benetton has strayed from traditional marketing techniques to provide customers with an idea of the many issues that plaque societies from continent to continent. This unique approach has been met with extreme emotions, and people have both praised and damned the Benetton advertisements. Although the advertisements often are considered controversial, photographs that feature such images as human suffering and sexual organs continue to grasp the attention of the world media. Benetton's focus on universal campaigns that represent different races, cultures, and lifestyles, often in direct opposition to acceptable standards, has become a concept used by companies that choose to maintain a common worldwide image.

As a company that is based largely on outsourcing, subcontracting, and relationships developed between a large company and several small producers and distributors, Benetton's success has become an example for multinational business around the world Benetton's ability to maximize profit and to minimize expenses has played a large role in its foundation. The retail market is not served directly by the company but by investors who purchased the right to sell Benetton items in their stores. Therefore, Benetton is a "pure manufacturer," providing only clothes and use of the Benetton names to franchisees.

Benetton's focus on creating an integrated relationship between the parent company and its licensees is further reflected in its efforts to speak personally to each consumer through the company advertisements. By using pictures of social issues that are familiar throughout the world, Benetton's advertisements appear to establish an intimate connection with all consumers, regardless of their ethnic background, language, or culture, by speaking through a medium that transcends national boundaries. As does its distribution method, Benetton strives to incorporate a sense of familiarity and family in each business sector. Because Benetton is largely managed by members of the Benetton family, the company can easier sustain the intimate communication network that many U.S. companies attempt to develop by organizing individual departments into teams.

Maintaining Luciano Benetton's ability to transform "sweaters into messages, shirts into signs, and jeans into signifiers," the company sought out an artist, not an advertiser who respected the rules of traditional marketing . Benetton hired Oliviero Toscani, a photographer who has earned recognition from his edgy photography style. Toscani chose to use print and poster as his media, a very unusual advertising decision for a clothing company. In addition, because television advertisements historically have cost retailers up to 62% of their advertising budgets, Benetton initially refused to promote itself on television. They later agreed to do so only on specific networks outside of Italy, such as MTV in the U.S.2

At the heart of Toscani's basic advertising and marketing strategy was what he often referred to as a "communications strategy" based on the diversity-focused slogan integrated into the United Colors of Benetton Campaigns. With this theme of unification, Toscani chose to transform advertising into "news," paying close attention to current events.2 Because Benetton's clothes were sold around the world, the expenses incurred to tailor campaigns to specific national markets would have been enormous. To reduce these high costs, Toscani attempted to bring the world's markets together by using a single advertisement that would appeal to many cultures, races, religions, and lifestyles. The goal was to reach people's souls, to invoke discussion of controversial topics, and to bring societies to the awareness that humans share many similar concerns. Even Benetton, a clothing company, can offer support to world-wide social issues.

Although many people considered it awkward that a clothing company, used humanitarian issues to promote itself, Toscani's ability to present devastating and critical events in unprecedented ways, such as photographing the death of an AIDS patient, succeeded in capturing people's attention and challenging their beliefs and ethical values.3 Because Toscani's approach to arousing public consciousness has received mixed reviews, it would be difficult to determine how the contentious images have deterred them from purchasing Benetton products, but others have praised the unique advertisements that promote messages of racial equality. However obscure the world's view is of the exclusive advertisements, when Toscani left Benetton in the summer of 2000, the company's sales were twenty times greater than they were when he arrived4

As Toscani continued to present his campaigns, consumers' responses varied from country to country. The advertisements even created feelings of hostility among Benetton's retailers that believed the advertisements had decreased sales3. Although Toscani was criticized for using politics to promote products, he stated that the issues he chose for the Benetton advertisements genuinely inspired him.3 To capture consumer audience, Toscani attempted to reach consumers by challenging the values that are often disregarded in retail advertisements and by stimulating discussion about extreme issues. Toscani's campaigns included scenes such as U.S. death row inmates, a newborn baby with its umbilical cord attached, and a black woman breast-feeding a white infant.

Because the guidelines for acceptable advertisements vary throughout the world, Benetton's campaigns were praised in some countries and damned in others. For example, a photograph of a priest and a nun kissing did not produce the extreme outcry in the United States as it did in Vatican City. The cultural perceptions of these photographs created diverse responses in global consumer markets. The traditional notion that what is acceptable in one society may not be acceptable in another is helpful in explaining why campaigns that exceed the limits of traditional advertising are liked by some people and disliked by others. Even though some campaigns caused market controversy, Toscani's attempt to integrate world concepts into his art also earned Benetton recognition in the art industry, which regarded his work as "the most inspiring thing ever seen."4 For example, today formerly culturally unacceptable images of scantily dressed models line the walls of airports and billboards in socially conservative countries like Turkey and