When Unilever executives sat in that boardroom deciding to acquire Dr. Squatch, they weren’t just buying a soap company.

They were signing the death certificate for traditional brand building.

The numbers tell the story. Dr. Squatch was seeking a $2 billion valuation based on $400 million in annual revenue. That’s a 5x revenue multiple for a brand that sells soap.

But here’s what most marketers missed about this acquisition.

Unilever wasn’t paying for soap recipes or supply chains. They were paying for something far more valuable and infinitely harder to replicate: cultural permission.

The Bathwater Moment That Changed Everything

The Sydney Sweeney bathwater campaign wasn’t just a viral stunt. It was a masterclass in monetising cultural chaos.

When Dr. Squatch launched “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss” soap, 973,000 people entered a giveaway to win 100 bars. The 5,000 bars available for purchase at $8 each sold out within seconds.

Most brands would have been cancelled for this concept.

Dr. Squatch got bought for billions.

The difference? Years of building what I would call “cultural permission” – the earned right to go completely wild and have your audience beg for more.

This wasn’t shock value marketing. It was calculated cultural engineering that traditional brands are structurally incapable of executing.

What Unilever Really Bought

When those Unilever executives analysed Dr. Squatch, they saw traditional metrics that looked good: 85% of revenue from direct sales, $90 million in EBITDA, and 100% revenue growth year-over-year.

But what lit up the room was something you can’t plug into Excel: a brand that could sell celebrity bathwater without looking desperate.

That’s not just performance marketing. That’s cultural permission turned into commercial power.

Unilever wasn’t buying a soap company. They were buying a repeatable flywheel of monetizable attention run by a team that knows how to convert chaos into commerce.

The acquisition came with perfect timing. Unilever’s new CEO Fernando Fernandez had already announced plans to allocate 50% of advertising spend to social while increasing influencer marketing investment by 20 times.

They knew the game had changed. They just couldn’t play it themselves.

Why Corporate Giants Can’t Build Cultural Relevance

Here’s the brutal truth about why Unilever bought Dr. Squatch instead of building their own version: they’re structurally incapable of creating what they just acquired.

Big brands are built for consensus, not controversy.

To launch one TikTok ad at a Fortune 500 company requires legal approval, regulatory review, DEI compliance, brand voice alignment, and a 47-slide deck explaining why the joke is “on-brand.”

By the time it ships, the cultural moment is dead.

Dr. Squatch said “dirty little boys” and turned it into millions in earned media. Procter & Gamble would have killed that concept at the word “dirty.”

Corporate brands optimise for quarterly predictability, not long-term cultural relevance. They end up buying what they don’t have the courage to build.

Cultural permission isn’t something you can license or acquire through market research. You earn it through repeated creative risk-taking that most public companies can’t stomach.

The Foundation That Enabled the Chaos

Dr. Squatch didn’t wake up one day and decide to sell bathwater soap. They spent years building the foundation that made that move feel inevitable rather than desperate.

They created a distinct brand voice that sounded like your bearded best friend roasting you for using synthetic body wash. They positioned themselves against the boring drugstore soap aisle. They built a content flywheel with YouTube ads generating 100 M+ views.

Most importantly, they built community trust that gave them permission to go wild.

When your audience expects weird, bold, and funny, selling bathwater soap becomes a cheeky power move instead of a brand identity crisis.

The bathwater campaign didn’t build the brand. The brand built the right to sell bathwater and get acquired for it.

The Death of Safe Brand Building

This acquisition signals more than a corporate purchase. It marks the funeral for the entire operating system that built every CPG giant of the 20th century.

The old playbook: spend millions on market research, run focus groups in suburban hotels, build brand equity over decades through TV and print, play it safe and scale slow.

That world is dead in a feed-based, TikTok-native economy.

The new playbook: drop a bathwater bar on Tuesday, launch with a meme instead of a product brief, let your audience co-write your marketing, and build brand equity in weeks instead of years.

You don’t need 10 years of Nielsen data when you have 50 million organic impressions, eight-figure Shopify sales, and a fanbase that DMs you ideas for the next weird drop.

We’re witnessing the re-platforming of brand building from boardroom to comment section, from demographics to vibe tribes, from market research to meme intelligence.

What This Means for Marketing Careers

Thousands of brand managers and CMOs built their careers on the old playbook. They’re facing a choice: evolve into creative conductors or become desperate uncles trying to use Gen Z slang.

The smart ones will pivot from control and consistency to curate and catalyse. They’ll stop trying to own the brand voice and start amplifying the audience’s voice.

They’ll build systems that let chaos breathe while still converting it into revenue.

The rest will keep optimising for impressions and recall while the next Dr. Squatch builds cult status in the comments section.

The Hybrid Future

Legacy brands will become distribution machines. Modern brands will be culture machines. The winners will merge both capabilities without killing either.

Dr. Squatch has the culture engine. Unilever has the retail muscle. If they can keep their hands off the creative voice while plugging it into global shelf space, that combination becomes unstoppable.

But corporate immune systems are designed to kill chaos. The moment a VP from Global Brand Compliance asks to “soften that headline about man funk,” the slow death begins.

Unilever didn’t buy Dr. Squatch to make it safe. They bought it because it wasn’t safe.

The question now: will they respect the wild horse or try to turn it into a show pony?

The age of safe and scaled is over. We’re in the era of chaos and conversion.

And the next billion-dollar brands will be built in public, in real-time, with audience permission instead of corporate process.

Sydney Sweeney’s reaction to the bathwater controversy perfectly captures this new reality. When critics complained, she didn’t apologise or distance herself from the campaign.

She said she pitched the idea herself.

That’s the mindset that builds brands worth billions in the attention economy. Not playing it safe, but playing it real.