Nivea is 100 years old this year. It was bounded back in 1882 by Carl Paul Beiersdorf. It started in Poland and was then bought by German investors. It’s probably actually older than 100 years as the official birthday (March 28th) is the date when Nivea filed a patent on the production of medical plasters – in reality Carl Beiersdorf would have had to have spent time inventing them before the patent could be filed.

It was as early as 1900 when the company filed a patent application of Eucerit. Eucerit is an emulsifying agent that would later become the base for NIVEA Creme.

It seems unlikely anyone would suggest Nivea is a company stuck in the past. For their 100 year birthday they’re looking a modern trends such as social networking. It might be easy for a skincare company to come out against Facebook, to rubbish it, to encourage people to get offline, go out and network – actually, that reminds me of so many shampoo ads. The good news is that Nivea is being far more sensible than that.

In this ad video, Nivea accept that there are some research papers which allude to lonely people being more likely to use Facebook… but then they challenge whether that means Facebook makes you lonely. They have Professor Geoffrey Beattie, the Head of School of Psycholigical Science at the University of Manchester share his thoughts and encourage further participation on Nivea’s own Facebook page.

In Pure Spirit

What do you think? Does Facebook make you lonely?