2009 Gold Effie Winner

“Axe Detailer: The Manly Shower Tool”

Category: New Product or Service

Brand/Client: Axe Shower
Primary Agency: BBH
Media Agency: MindShare
Contributing Agencies: Edelman, Integrated Marketing Services

Strategic Challenge

This is the story of a challenge that communications alone could not solve – of creative
thinking applied on a more fundamental scale, starting with product design and carried all
the way to the retail shelf.

In 2007, after two years of propulsive growth, Axe Shower Gel was at the top of the male personal
wash category. Young guys loved the brand, thought our products were innovative, and couldn’t get
enough of our communications. But our sales had begun to plateau.

Because we’d hit a ceiling on form conversion. 53% of our target (18-34 year old guys) still switched
between bars and shower gel, and 33% stuck entirely with their old-fashioned, non-Axe (and low-
margin) bar soap.1

1
Shower Habits & Attitudes Study, 2007

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 Objectives

We needed to get these form switchers to stop using bar soap and start using more Axe Shower Gel.
Specifically, we were looking to increase Axe Shower Gel occasions by 4% and sales by 13%.2

But it wouldn’t be easy. This was deeply ingrained behavior we were out to change, as these guys
had grown up with bar soap and tended to use it while on half-asleep autopilot.

The challenge required a radical solution, and the Axe and agency teams got there by collaborating
closely together, applying our joint thinking and creativity to something bigger than advertising. We
solved the problem with product innovation.

The Big Idea

Sell more Axe Shower Gel by creating a manly shower tool

The Aha! moment

We started by segmenting our target by form usage. We found that while 30% of guys were so
attached to their bars that it would take a cataclysm to move them, another 70% were open to the
shower gel form and to Axe specifically. They liked how it smelled, how convenient it was, how
modern and cool it felt. But in the end they worried it didn’t clean as well as a bar, which they used
to really “dig in there”, especially when used with a washcloth.3

Perception-shifting communications seemed like the easiest solution, but there was a catch. They
weren’t enough. As tracking proved, our recent “How Dirty Boys Get Clean” campaign had
successfully built efficacy credentials and incremental sales – but hadn’t changed behavior among
this target.

So what did? We thought we found the secret when we cross-tabbed our TNS usage diary data:
there was a striking correlation between the use of a loofah and satisfaction with shower gel’s
cleansing power.4 The combination built more lather and scrubbed better than a bar-washcloth
combination, which in turn made guys more likely to use it. The loofah, we realized, was the key
that unlocked additional shower gel occasions.

But it wasn’t that simple. When we dug deeper with a shower ethnography (very helpful, if at times
awkward), we discovered that the guys using loofahs weren’t using tough sponges ripped from the
bottom of the sea. They were using poufs: pink, fluffy, soft – and totally girlie. They just called
them “loofahs” to minimize the shame.

Now, the guys we were going after were a pretty macho bunch. There was no way they’d be seen
walking down their dorm hallways with a pouf or even a New Agey loofah – and without one, they
weren’t using shower gel.

2
Client briefing
3
Shower Segmentation, 2007
4
TNS Usage Diary, 2006

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 But those were the only options in the market. If we wanted to sell more shower gel, we’d have to
fill the white space and create the first shower tool designed specifically for guys.

Developing the product

Development kicked off with a series of exploratory groups, in-home interviews and co-creation
workshops that brought together the clients, the agency, our guys, and an industrial design firm.
Together we chopped the average Unilever NPD cycle in half and uncovered the essential building
blocks for our product strategy:
• Our guys wanted something tough, like a real loofah…
• …But not so tough. Turns out real loofahs can abrade your skin pretty bad.
• And abrasion is the last thing guys want on some of their most sensitive – and, when it comes to
girls, most important – parts. As guys told us, the “manzone” may get swampy, but cleaning it
up requires a delicate touch a loofah can’t provide.
• Then again, guys recognized that parts like the elbows need and can stand up to a good, tough
scrubbing. Thus something soft like a pouf wouldn’t cut it either, no matter how masculine.
• We realized that the key was control: guys wanted to match the level of scrub to their different
needs, which we mapped out with exacting (and sometimes alarming) precision.
• Why so precise? Because guys told us that girls notice every detail, from head to toe – and each
needs its proper level of scrubbing.

The output of this consumer-focused research got us to a product design we were thrilled with: a
dual-sided tool that guys loved, and that in turn would help Axe Shower Gel outperform the tried-
and-true bar of soap.

Bringing the Idea to Life

The creative leap

The creative brief was a natural extension of this product research and development cycle. Its
central promise: rough and gentle scrubs get all of your parts clean for her.

As we began to work with our creatives, however, we realized that guys would need a bit of simple
product education to embrace a tool they might not know what to make of. It’s a lesson we learned
years ago, when we introduced guys to another new kind of grooming product: body spray, which
launched with shamelessly-entertaining demo work.

But here we had a creative challenge unique to the category: how do you make a demo about a guy
taking a shower entertaining, and avoid the dreaded naked man-torso overload?

The creative answer came directly from the winning product design, which was then in prototype
form. It looked uncannily like a car tire – totally masculine, totally functional, totally cool.

Our creatives took the inspiration and ran with it, naming the tool the Detailer and rooting
everything about it in car culture, starting with its logo and pack.

What if, they wondered, our shower tool were like a car wash for guys, with different cleaning
‘stations’ for different parts and needs, each run by sexy female automatons?

And there it was, our communications idea: the Guywash.

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 The comms tasks
We had a very small window to land the Detailer at retail, or our customers would quickly de-list it.
That Unilever had to invest in new supply chain routes and production partners only ratcheted up
the pressure: this was a high-profile project that had to hit big. Thus we identified two related
comms tasks:

Task 1: Come out swinging with awareness-driving work that makes the most of each medium’s
strengths.
• We used the storytelling power of long-form cinema to demo the product on an epic scale,
then followed up on TV with :30 and :15 cutdowns.
• We used digital’s interactivity to give guys a chance to try out the Detailer. Rather than build
an elaborate microsite and all of the requisite drivers, though, we took our digital content to
where guys already were, giving them extra fun in the appropriate context:
o The “Dirty Night Determinator” utility hit guys online in the places where they plan
their adventures, prescribing a personalized scrub routine to clean up after whatever
dirty situations they get in.
o With our PR partner, we used Facebook’s social tools to get girls to send a cheeky Gift
to guys in need of a good scrubbing, and to ship a free Detailer to anyone who asked
for one on our brand page.
• Our dead-simple print work puts the product on a beautiful, close-up pedestal – and then
gets it dirty with a wink.

Task 2: Retail the hell out of the Detailer, propelling guys to the register and cross-selling with Axe
Shower Gel. To achieve this task we worked with Axe’s shopper marketing team to map out the
desired consumer journey:
• Local-area promotions drove him to the store
• In-store Detailer “technicians” introduced him to the real-life product and guided him to the
shower section
• POS turned the shelf into a mini-guywash, and put adjacencies to work to cross-sell our
shower gel
Communications Touch Points
TV Packaging Trade Shows
Spots Product Design Sponsorship
Branded Content Cinema Retail Experience
Sponsorship Interactive POP
Product placement Online Ads Video
Radio Web site In-Store Merchandizing
Spots Viral video Sales Promotion
Merchandising Video skins/bugs Retailtainment
Program/content Social Networking sites Guerrilla
Print Podcasts Street Teams
Trade/Professional Gaming Tagging
Newspaper Mobile Phone Wraps
Consumer Magazine Other_____________ Buzz Marketing
Print partnership OOH Ambient Media
Direct Airport Sampling/Trial
Mail Transit Consumer Involvement
Email Billboard WOM

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Tel: 212-687-3280 Fax: 212-557-9242

©2009: The information available through effie.org is the property of the Effie Awards and is protected by copyright and other intellectual
property laws. This brief may be displayed, reformatted and printed for your personal use only. By using this site, you agree not to
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 PR Place Based Consumer Generated
Events Other_____________ Viral
Other ____________

Additional Marketing Components:

None

Reach:

National

Total Media Expenditure:

$5 - 10 million

Results

Sales
• A month after our campaign launched the Detailer became the #1 Axe SKU, one that is
incremental to both the Axe brand and the male personal wash category.
• Despite limited distribution, weekly sales began rising steadily with the rollout of
communications in late June.

$2.5
$2.0
$ Sales (MM)

$1.5
$1.0
$0.5
$0.0
May-08 Jun-08 Jul-08 Aug-08 Sep-08
12 wks Ending

• The average number of units sold per Wal-Mart store per week – the retailer’s key sales
benchmark – was more than twice that of the typical shower gel product.
• It’s turning so fast on shelf, in fact, that some stores can’t keep it in stock (a rarity in just-
in-time replenishment retailing). Other stores, meanwhile, have doubled their facings – a
huge win in a hyper-competitive section.
• Axe Shower’s share would be 6% higher each month since the Detailer’s launch if it were
included in the category’s market share report – and in personal wash, share growth is
usually measured in much smaller increments.5

5
Client sales data

Effie® Awards
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Tel: 212-687-3280 Fax: 212-557-9242

©2009: The information available through effie.org is the property of the Effie Awards and is protected by copyright and other intellectual
property laws. This brief may be displayed, reformatted and printed for your personal use only. By using this site, you agree not to
reproduce, retransmit, distribute, sell, publicly display, publish or broadcast the information to anyone without the prior written consent of
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 But those numbers wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if we hadn’t achieved our over-arching objectives:
to drive more Axe Shower Gel occasions. And there we more than succeeded.
• The Detailer increased Axe Shower Gel occasions by 5% vs our 4% goal, and helped lift Axe
Shower Gel to 17% sales growth vs our 13% goal. 6
• As evidenced below left, our strongest period of Shower Gel sales growth highly correlates
with our strongest period of Detailer communications activity (months 3 – 5).
• The Detailer also helped drive consistent Axe Shower Gel share growth, as evidenced on the
graph below right, where the peak again correlates to communications activity.7
07-08 AXE Shower Sales Growth*
07-08 AXE Shower Share Change*

0.25
14%
0.20 12%
Sales Growth

Share Change (%)

10%
0.15
8%
0.10 6%
0.05 4%
2%
- 0%
1 2 3 4 5 6 -2% 1 2 3 4 5 6
Months Post Launch Months Post Launch
* Excludes Detailer * Excludes Detailer

Communications

The Millward Brown tracking results for the Detailer campaign proves it cut through, connected, and
drove key brand imagery statements:8

AXE Unilever
Detailer Average
% %
Correct Branding 70 38
Enjoyed Watching The Commercial 63 53
Learned Something New 35 17
Made Me More Likely To Buy The Product 37 33
Made The Brand Seem More Appealing 49 46
Made Me Think Differently About The Brand 35 28
Made Me Think The Brand Is Really Different
From Others 42 33
Buzz 44 32

6
Millward Brown Q308 Tracking Study
7
Client sales data
8
Millward Brown Q308 Tracking Study

Effie® Awards
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Tel: 212-687-3280 Fax: 212-557-9242

©2009: The information available through effie.org is the property of the Effie Awards and is protected by copyright and other intellectual
property laws. This brief may be displayed, reformatted and printed for your personal use only. By using this site, you agree not to
reproduce, retransmit, distribute, sell, publicly display, publish or broadcast the information to anyone without the prior written consent of
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 Key Imagery Measure % Change vs. YAG
Are enjoyable to use +8%
Leave your skin feeling really clean +11%
Rinse off your skin quickly and easily +11%
Lather quickly and easily +17%
Cleanse skin deeply +10%
Give a deeper clean than ordinary shower gels and body washes +10%

Digitally, analytics put the campaign results significantly above our ad-server’s benchmarks.9
• Our 9.16% interaction rate well exceeded the benchmark, indexing at 131
• That interaction translated to 1.39 million uses of the Dirty Night Determinator
• On average those users spent 42 seconds with the tool, indexed 130 to the benchmark

Lastly, the Detailer and our work got guys talking in ways we never anticipated:
• 630,000+ YouTube spot views to date and over 500 comments.
• 101 product reviews on Amazon.com, with a 4 star rating average.
• 2,839 Facebook requests for a free Detailer and 63,786 Detailer Gifts given.
• “Axe Detailer” searches were as popular as (and sometimes more) “Axe Effect” searches –
traditionally our biggest hit

Anything else going on that might have helped drive results?

Factors working in our favor:

- Also launched several new & popular shower gel products in this period
- Had a superior merchandising program at key retailers

Factors working against us:

- Decreased share of voice (category TRPs doubled and our share dropped)

9
Eyeblaster Analytics

Effie® Awards
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Tel: 212-687-3280 Fax: 212-557-9242

©2009: The information available through effie.org is the property of the Effie Awards and is protected by copyright and other intellectual
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reproduce, retransmit, distribute, sell, publicly display, publish or broadcast the information to anyone without the prior written consent of
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 - Increased competition in our traditional “help with the girl” space (Irish Spring and Gillette)
- Heavy promotion and price discounting in category

Effie® Awards
116 E. 27 St., 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016
th

Tel: 212-687-3280 Fax: 212-557-9242

©2009: The information available through effie.org is the property of the Effie Awards and is protected by copyright and other intellectual
property laws. This brief may be displayed, reformatted and printed for your personal use only. By using this site, you agree not to
reproduce, retransmit, distribute, sell, publicly display, publish or broadcast the information to anyone without the prior written consent of
the Effie Awards.