Integrated Marketing

Communication

Mohit Lakhotia

2014B16

AXE grooming products

pg. 1

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. 2

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. 3

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. 4

MODES OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION

In order to achieve the objectives of any marketing campaign through well-

coordinated 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:

Advertising

Sales Promotion

Personal Selling

Direct Marketing

Event Marketing

Public Relations

Word of Mouth

Interactive Marketing

pg. 5

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. 6

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. 7

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. 8

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. 9

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. 10

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. 11

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. 12

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. 13

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. 14

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. 15

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. 16

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 non-

aerosol 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. 17

REFERENCES

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1681417/how-axe-built-a-highly-scientific-totally-

irresistible-marketing-machine-built-on-lust

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe_(brand) http://www.adforum.com/search/creative-work/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). Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/anafts/plan-marketing-axe