Axe. It’s Never Subtle.
Its TV commercials are everywhere. But Axe has other ways of targeting guys. Highlights from recent years:
I tell Lorello he’s fortunate that Axe doesn’t actually compel women to
charge toward him. Here in the lab it would trigger a mad rush resulting
in thousands of broken bottles, glass and blood and fluid everywhere,
and a choking perfumery stench requiring a full-floor evacuation. Lorello
smiles and says, “It wouldn’t be a bad thing, though.”
MAN Y-LADIES MAN
In Tunisia, Axe enabled men to set their
Facebook status as “in a relationship” with
hundreds of women.
2011
PREVIOUSSPREAD:STYLING: KATIERUSCH.THISPAGE:PRNEWSFOTO/AXE(AXEMAN); EUGENE GOLOGURSKY/
GETTYIMAGESFORAXE(AXELOUNGE).OPPOSITEPAGE:JEFFREYCOOLIDGE/GETTYIMAGES
To conjure male fantasies, to be a testosterone whisperer, Axe’s
marketing team must engage in constant sociological study. It must
consider that, according to its research, the majority of college-aged males
and only about a quarter of females consider themselves more attractive
than average—and then act on that information. It must understand not
just the desires of young men but how they try to fulfill them. “I’ve been
sort of a student of the game for 12 years,” says David Rubin, 41, an Axe
marketing director who’s been with the brand since 2000. “I hope my
wife doesn’t hear that.”
Rubin is slim and affably dorky, a student who likely didn’t have much
game. In fact, all the Axe employees seem more study hall than weight
room. Which is just fine, apparently, because these guys’ game expired the
moment they graduated. Axe managers are trained to discard old tactics—
to know that every year, a new horde of kids will enter their demographic
with new social habits and that Axe can’t speak to them like it spoke to last
year’s class. “The key to the brand,” says 44-year-old Matthew McCarthy,
U.S. brand development director for deodorants and fragrances, “is we have
an essence that remains constant. We don’t spend any time trying to rein-
vent the brand, but we watch how guys and girls interact. That part evolves.”
Rubin and McCarthy are in a fraternity of sorts: the Axe Republic.
That’s the name that, without irony, the global Axe team uses to refer to
itself. Theirs is an adventurous life, involving frequent forays into college
towns, where the Axe team joins bar crawls and keggers. Older Republic
members have designated “trendslators,” fresh hires who can explain
what’s on teens’ minds. And when these new pledges are brought in,
they’re even shown an indoctrination film. It’s a classic clip from The
Matrix, where the hero, Neo, is offered two pills—a blue one to preserve
his ignorance, or a red one that will show him a new reality. Axe is the
red pill. “It encapsulates what the Axe Republic is about,” Rubin says.
“There is a whole bunch of stuff that might apply to other Unilever brands
that doesn’t apply to the Republic.
The rules of gravity can be pushed.”
As an example, McCarthy suggests we watch what he calls “CYB.”
That turns out to mean Cleans Your
Balls, a 2010 infomercial spoof to
advertise Axe’s “Detailer,” a loofah
for guys too self-conscious to use a
loofah. (It’s by design: “Grooming
habits may not change week to
week, but the psychographics and
emotions around them change,”
Rubin says. Axe catered its product
to the moment—guys were ready to
scrub, the marketing team sur-
HILLARY ENDORSES OBAMA 2008
AXEMAN
A game for
mobile and PCs, in
which you gather
college girls
for a party and
dodge aggressive
dudes.
2012
AXE LOUNGE
The company operated
a Hamptons nightclub
all summer, stocking
the bathroom with you-know-what.
2009
GAMEKILLERS
A half-hour M TV
series, cocreated
with Axe, about
annoying people
who ruin guys’
efforts to impress
girls.
2007
FULL BENEFI TS
A sponsored
sitcom-style show
on CollegeHumor
.com, about twenty-somethings dating
and hooking up.
2010
During the
Democratic
primaries,
Axe posted an
image of Hillary
Clinton wear-
ing an Obama
pin, with the
words “Imagine
the power
of AXE.”
There are standards
and conventions
that might apply to
other Unilever
brands that don’t
apply to marketers
working for the Axe
Republic. At Axe,
“the rules of gravity
can be pushed.”
mised, but they feared feeling froufrou.) The cohosts of CYB are two
beautiful women who use the Detailer to polish sports equipment. One
scrubs down a pair of golf balls, then hands them to her cohost. “Go ahead
and play with those clean balls, Denise,” she says. And so Denise does,
rolling them around in her hand for 13 aching seconds. “This scene,” says
marketing director Gaston Vaneri, as we watch Denise sexually harass
the entire sport of golf, “was discussed for a very long time.”
And it survived. The brand is granted a higher risk tolerance than other
Unilever brands, such as Dove or Lipton. Its marketing can offend delicate
sensibilities. Axe produces ads with an all-or-nothing mentality. “We avoid
the debate with our legal department around à la carting a spot,” Vaneri
says. “There’s no discussion of, ‘Can you remove those 13 seconds?’ We
either do the spot, or we don’t.” Still, he says, the Republic isn’t cavalier.
