David Beckham is an all-too familiar sight in ad campaigns, recently clocking up appearances for (among others) Pepsi, Stella Artois, Nespresso, Walkers, and Adidas. Not forgetting multiple underwear shots for Hugo Boss and the much-memed 2024 Uber Eats Super Bowl spot alongside his wife Victoria.
Beckham’s monumental global appeal for brands is reinforced by his family man image (setting aside a reported fling back in 2003) but that image is being shattered by a recent clash with the eldest of his four children, Brooklyn. All sorts of muck is being thrown at various members of the clan, and some of it is likely to stick.
How will brand Beckham fare now? The couple and their four children have spent years marketing themselves as a united, happy family, so a falling out was definitely not in the business plan.
Brooklyn, the errant firstborn, has already managed to carve out many careers for himself over the course of his 26 years, which surely could not have been possible without family connections. In the above film for Jaguar from February, he talks about sharing a love of racing with his dad, plugs his new condiment line Cloud 23 (named after Beckham’s shirt number at Real Madrid) – and it’s all set in Miami where his dad owns a football team.
Model, photographer, chef, hot sauce maker and now a Formula E driver for Jaguar, can he sustain all those gear changes without family support? If Brooklyn wants to keep up his condiment career, his father in law Nelson Peltz – one of the world’s richest men – is a former director of Heinz, which might help.
Social media posts can project the image of a perfect family, but real life inevitably catches up. As Netflix reveals in a recent series on “The dark side of kidfluencing,” there’s often a toxic reality behind the fantasy we are fed online.
The fascination with the Beckhams is likely to continue, but the brand is inevitably tarnished now that the veil has been lifted and we can see that the feuding family are not so perfect after all. Although a carefully staged tearful reunion would be good for business.
