Amy's Robot

Tweens and Axe: Girls edition

I'm fascinated by the boundless popularity of Axe body spray, sold by Unilever and the subject of years of goofy fantasy ads featuring lust-crazed women driven to the point of sexual combustion when they get a whiff of Axe. The two secrets about Axe body spray that are in no way detectable by the ad campaigns are: 1) it's just cheap perfume that retails for $5.49 at CVS, and 2) its most dedicated users seem to be middle school boys.

Though its customers might be 12 year-olds who don't have a remote, or legal, hope of bagging any of the hot women in the ads, Axe understands its appeal is aspirational. In an article in the Times from a couple of years ago about Axe's youthful devotees, the company wisely claims its target market is 18-24 year old men, because "nothing would make an older teenager run from a product faster than for its manufacturers to acknowledge that it's a must-have among the sixth-grade set."

Today's news is that Axe is developing a body spray FOR WOMEN. Their latest product, "Anarchy", will be marketed with different versions for men and women. A short ad is online, featuring a male shoplifter being chased by a female cop. Both of them gradually disrobe as they tear through the streets, until they stop, face each other, recognize their mutual hotness, and embrace in an explosion of panting, sexy Axeness. The actors are adults in their 20's; the intended audience is, I guess, tweens. More unisex ads, like the still shot above, are coming soon.

An advertising creative director says the new Axe for girls is about gender equality: "Before, an Axe commercial was always about a guy spraying himself and a girl being attracted, and Axe giving him an edge in the mating game, whereas now women also have something to spray on themselves, and consequently there's more of an equilibrium between the sexes."

And that's exactly why Axe for women is going to go nowhere, according to David Vinjamuri, author of Accidental Branding and marketing professor at NYU. For Axe to stay successful, it has to remember who its customers are. "If you’re a teenaged boy and you looked at the advertising, you saw the girl that you want and the guy that you are. When you start talking to someone who's not your core audience, you lose credibility with your core audience. The moment you start talking to girls, you lose credibility with teenage boys."

He's saying that boys want Axe because Axe is for them, and not for girls. The narrative is this: boys get their moms to buy them some Axe, they envelope bodies in an irresistibly sexy fog of body spray, they go to school, the girls in Language Arts go crazy for them. If this equation suddenly included regular girls wanting to be sexy, using Axe, and boys then becoming helpless with unbridled desire, then boys will, I suppose, sense Unilever's corporate mission drift, become sullen and withdrawn, and go back to playing Call of Duty.

Another reason Axe might not catch on with girls is that evidence suggests they think it's gross. As 14 year-old Allison Testamark told the Washington Post, "Someone by my locker uses it, but he uses so much that you can taste it in your mouth," she said, scrunching up her nose in disgust.

Girls might just have to let the boys keep their Axe and be content with all the gender-specific products out there created just for them, such as Walmart's line of makeup for 8 to 12-year olds or KMart's "I ♥ Rich Boys" girls' thong.

categories: Business
posted by amy at 3:34 PM | #