Integrated Marketing

Communication
AXE grooming products

Mohit Lakhotia
2014B16

CONTENTS
Summary ........................................................................................ 2
History of the brand AXE ................................................................ 3
Modes of Marketing Communication............................................... 4
Advertising .......................................................................... 5
Marketing through Events and Personal Experiences ........ 8
Direct Marketing ................................................................ 10
Interactive Marketing......................................................... 11
Word of mouth .................................................................. 13
Publicity ............................................................................ 13
Packaging ......................................................................... 15
Recommendations ............................................................ 16
References ....................................................................................17

pg. 1

SUMMARY
The Axe brand of deodorants from Hindustan Unilever is the market leader and
primarily targets males between 16 to 35 years of age. Axe's lead product is a
deodorant body spray. The brand also includes deodorant sticks, roll-ons,
antiperspirants, aftershaves and shower gels. In most of the world the brand is
named Axe; in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Kingdom it is
named Lynx due to conflicts regarding the trademark.
The brand portrays normal yet cool, trendy and confident, a positioning that is
aspirational to the target segment and the portrayed outcome where the girls
flock to the Axe user is, well lets just say very desirable! At a more subtle level,
the Axe Effect also acts on the confidence levels of the user.
The theme and material for most adverts from Axe have been borderline explicit
and sensual at best. The content definitely clicks with the target consumer
group. Although, Axe has the potential to increase its reach and share by
marketing to females and exploiting other products from their portfolio, the
existing approach of sensual, lust based content might not work with other
segments.
Axes attention-grabbing ads have won numerous accolades including 10 wins
at Cannes lions advertising awards. Their recent achievements include British
arrows 2013 award and 2 wins at the Festival of Media Awards, Valencia.

pg. 2

HISTORY OF THE BRAND AXE

Launched in France in 1983 by Unilever. Axe was inspired by another of
Unilever's brands, Impulse.
As mentioned earlier, Unilever were unable to use the name Axe in the United
Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand due to trademark problems it was
launched as Lynx.
The European launch of the deodorant was followed by success in Latin
America and moderate impact in Asia and Africa. In the new millennium, the
brand has launched with great success in the United States and Canada. The
company has also consolidated its deodorant portfolio by migrating other
overlapping male deodorants into the Lynx brand such as South Africa's Ego
brand.
In January 2012, Unilever launched its first Axe/Lynx product for women in the
United Kingdom as part of a global expansion of the previously mens-only
brand. As Axe has started to diversify its portfolio, we can safely state that the
marketing philosophy of the brand might also diversify in the coming future.

pg. 3

MODES OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION

In order to achieve the objectives of any marketing campaign through wellcoordinated use of different promotional methods reinforcing each other there
needs to be consistency and integration among all methods employed.

Usually the different modes of marketing communications can be put under the
following heads:

pg. 4

Advertising
Sales Promotion
Personal Selling
Direct Marketing
Event Marketing
Public Relations
Word of Mouth
Interactive Marketing

ADVERTISING
The strongest weapon in the Axe armory of marketing, their broadcast ads be it
television, print ads or even on the internet have always been witty, funny and
well accepted. As a paid form of non-personal presentation of products,
advertising needs great detailing and has to form the unseen connect with the
target group. In all its TV commercials, print ads and billboards, AXE has tried
to attract people with its double meaning clever humor, pointing out the desires
of an average young male (not subtly most of the time). Few examples are
undermentioned:

pg. 5

Apart from its regular ads, Axe have been known to have using word-play based
ad campaigns in different countries for different variants. For example, during
the launch of its new range of shower gels, Axe created a whole campaign
around the idea of How dirty boys get clean.

pg. 6

Chocolate Month of the Year Axe launched a campaign in November 2008

to promote its new variant Axe Dark Temptation in India. It was a 24 hour online
campaign in which a dark man was placed in the center of the yahoo.in
homepage. If anyone visited the homepage then this dark man was converted
to chocolate man after the deodorant was sprayed on him and then rushes
inside a banner ad, post which the real consumer engagement began. If there
is a click on the banner ad then the content on the homepage changed into the
chocolate related stories and the Yahoo logo turned brown in color with
chocolate dripping from it. The user was further enabled to send a box of
chocolate to any person. This service was made available only if the person
visited the site of Axe which required him to fill a form. This campaign had the
capacity of reaching 3.5 million users of Yahoo in 2008.

Backed up with the TV commercials and this campaign proved to be a hit for
what turned out to be a not so great product.

pg. 7

MARKETING THROUGH EVENTS AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

Personal experiences provide a great opportunity to the brand by attaching an
aspirational value to the brand many times.
Axe Boat Party was a tremendous success on this front, wherein the company
offered the opportunity to its users to have a boat party with models. The same
idea was used by the brand in many countries. Ad campaign for the Boat Party
in India showed gorgeous models stereotyping the India male and still asking
for their company.

Sponsored activities and programs designed to create brand interaction are

good way to gain visibility. Axe organizes theme based events from time to time
such as creating a model space academy for the launch of their fragrance Axe
Apollo.

pg. 8

Keeping in mind the target consumer group, Axe has also sponsored and
partnered up in a lot of events such as shows, concerts, colleges fest etc. This
gave them a platform to showcase their promise of wild experiences and
provided them opportunities to survey people at such events

pg. 9

DIRECT MARKETING
Axe having built an effective, integrated campaign in the US and other markets
leveraging different media to reach young, hip males with unconventional
messaging to promote its grooming products, hit bulls eye in Japan in 2010 by
using an extensively personalized technique.

The Axe Wake-Up Service campaign was successful because it did two crucial
things: it tapped into the target audience's existing behaviour, and it built upon
that by helping people do what they do better. Japan loves cell phones, Axe
found that nearly 70% of Japanese consumers used their mobile phones as
alarm clocks as early as 2010. To tap into that, Axe launched a service where a
consumer could visit Axe online, enter in his mobile number and set a wake-up
call time.
A young, attractive woman would make the wake-up call, even appearing by
videophone if the customer desired. The campaign, of course, reminded the
customer every morning to spray on some Axe and smell great!

The same idea was eventually used in many countries by Axe.

pg. 10

AXEs Call Me Campaign in India was an emulation of the aforementioned

and had a few extensions from the wake me service. One of them was - when
a guy tried on a pair of jeans or a shirt in the store, he will find a Polaroid picture
in his pocket of a beautiful girl with her phone number, or a visiting card with the
number and the message Call me. The activity was done in 24 stores in where
approximately 1300 Polaroids and 500 visiting cards were placed per store.

INTERACTIVE MARKETING
Programs to engage customers with the brand and its products through various
modes of social media and the internet are particularly useful for this target
group since they tend to spend a good chunk of time online. Axe has a dedicated
website - http://theaxeeffect.com for promotion of existing AXE products and
introduction of new ones.
Axe are big on social media and customers can interact with the brand on
Facebook, Twitter and many other informal channels. This gives the brand an
opportunity to portray their customer friendliness and maintain as well as create
relations with the clientele. Axe have an official Facebook page as well as an
official Fan page both having well over 4million likes.

pg. 11

Axe Click Campaign began in 2006 to promote its new fragrance CLICK. It
was a global campaign targeting single men out in the dark world of dating. The
objective was to create a potential buzz word Clicking amongst the youth. A
brilliant example of 360 degree marketing with the TV ads and the website totally
complementing each other. Initially a website www.clickmore.com was launched
to generate excitement. Later the full site was launched with interactive games
and leaderboards to display top scorers from each week. In USA the TV
commercials for this campaign starred Ben Affleck and in India it was Ranbir
Kapoor.

pg. 12

WORD OF MOUTH
AXE ad campaigns have always been subjects of interesting conversations and
to the keen viewers eye nothing is more fascinating than double meaning
content. The humor in the ads travels from person to person and creates a vibe
throughout its existing and prospective customers. AXE, through its ads has
always tried to capitalize on the dark, hidden aspirations of people and brought
them up by putting them up on TV and print.

PUBLICITY
Using the right elements in all its outdoor ads, subtly putting the message across
by a graphic illustration backed with a clever one-liner Axe has been bang on.

pg. 13

A lot these outdoor ads are dynamic as well, to put across messages related to
mood of the user and how the product connects with it.

Any new offering from the brand has always been awaited and the company has
used tactful strategies for successful launches. Press releases by Axe have
always enjoyed a huge audience base and never disappointed the loyal Axe
user. Axe has managed to put the same message of desirability across with all
its campaigns but have never failed to create something new in terms of
creativity every time.

pg. 14

PACKAGING
Packaging involves designing and producing the container or wrapper for
a product. Growing Use of packaging as a marketing tool is now evident
because of the following reasons
1. Self service
2. Consumer affluence: consumers are now willing to pay a little more for
convenience, appearance and prestige of better packages.
3. Company & Brand Image: Instant Recognition
4. Innovation Opportunity

Axe has always had a distinctive edgy packaging theme, making use of vibrant
colors for each product usually having black as the base color and then an
abstract design or a tribal pattern of a contrasting color on it.

pg. 15

RECOMMENDATIONS
Although most of the marketing plans by the brand have been successful, Axe
hasnt fared particularly well in the recent times considering the rise of nonaerosol based perfumes by competitors. Axe also has launched similar
products but slightly late as compared to others. Awareness for the same needs
to be handled more aggressively and Axe should devise dedicated campaigns
using their proven techniques of fiddling with the viewers mind.
Another area of improvement for the brand can be to diversify their focus on the
female grooming products as well, Axe although has offerings in this segment
but needs to focus in terms of advertising as well. Suggestion would be to have
dedicated ads for the deodorants for ladies, as compared to the combo or
bundled ads they have.

pg. 16

REFERENCES
http://www.fastcocreate.com/1681417/how-axe-built-a-highly-scientific-totallyirresistible-marketing-machine-built-on-lust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe_(brand)
http://www.adforum.com/search/creativework/campaign/How%20Dirty%20Boys%20Get%20Clean%20-%20Axe
Connected

Marketing

by

Justin

kirby

and

paul

mardsen

Axes Brand Personality and Equity - Miguel Raminhos Gonalves Santos

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/business/media/28adco.html?fta=y
Plan
marketing
axe.
(2010,
February
17).
http://www.slideshare.net/anafts/plan-marketing-axe

pg. 17

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