As Cracker Barrel lately realized, transferring away from what customers need can flip a model bland — except that’s what a model’s followers are clamoring for. Which is the case for a brand new rebrand by Axe, the Unilever line of males’s grooming merchandise.
Axe at the moment (Oct. 10) launched a can designed in collaboration with Emily Zugay, a graphic designer who has gone viral on TikTok for her deadpan humor and absurdist tackle model logos. In Axe’s case, the brand new limited-edition providing is a white can with a lone, clip art-style graphic of an axe, with retail shows that recast the model’s identify as “The Cologne Folks.”
The collaboration started with a TikTok put up Zugay made in July through which she revealed the brand new axe-based emblem and mentioned the model “wasn’t made for boys in center faculty locker rooms — it was made for males.” The put up notched greater than 5 million views, a half million likes and greater than 2,000 feedback and rapidly caught the model’s consideration.
“The response from our followers was actually loud and clear,” mentioned Dolores Assalini, head of Axe U.S. “They wished the brand new emblem, and we listened.”
Inside 24 hours, Axe mocked up a can with Zugay’s design and shortly posted it on social media. As a part of the TikTok star’s largest-scale model partnership to this point, Axe appointed the designer as its new Massive Boss — a faux place on the coronary heart of a collection of posts on the model’s TikTok and Instagram pages — and made the can obtainable for buy on Walmart’s web site.
“Manufacturers that don’t take themselves too significantly and lean into meme tradition actually join with folks at the moment,” Zugay mentioned in an announcement. “In a world oversaturated with conventional adverts, it’s the manufacturers that really feel relatable and make us chuckle or really feel one thing that stick in our minds.”
Not solely is the collaboration an instance of social listening, a commonplace tactic within the social media period, however an acknowledgment of how the model’s customers — largely younger males — need to work together with manufacturers.
“Younger guys at the moment do not need to simply be spoken to. They need to really feel like they’re a part of the method of making manufacturers,” Assalini mentioned. “Gen Z guys and Gen Alpha guys actually worth on-line tradition and influencer-driven tendencies, and so they need manufacturers to collaborate with them and provides them what they need inside this area.”
Past authenticity
To present its target market what it desires, Axe has gone past the deal with authenticity bandied about by each model marketer trying to mirror shopper tradition to attach at a deeper stage with how its customers dwell. Gen Z and Gen Alpha create content material at a a lot larger stage than previous generations, and so they’re not simply customers of media — they need to be part of it, Assalini mentioned.
“We’re not simply displaying up the place they’re, talking their language and utilizing their memes, however we’re reflecting the tradition that they are creating, and mixing that with who we’re as a model,” she defined.
To increase the collaboration, Axe has adopted one other common marketer tactic, utilizing social and influencer content material to amplify its broader efforts. Zugay’s content material with Axe performs into fan lore in regards to the thought of Axe’s “massive boss,” additional embedding the trouble into customers’ relationship with the model.
“It isn’t only a one-and-done — ‘we’re making them, we’re promoting it.’ We’re creating a complete story and leisure cycle round it,” Assalini mentioned. “It is including worth when it comes to making a story, however it’s additionally encouraging them to have interaction and proceed to be part of this course of. In each put up that we do, we’re getting engagement for our group.”
One of these social-first advertising and marketing is rapidly turning into crucial for CPG entrepreneurs. Axe’s guardian firm Unilever made waves this 12 months when CEO Fernando Fernandez mentioned the corporate would shift half of its advert spend to social and multiply its work with influencers 20 fold. For Unilever manufacturers like Dove and Axe which have lengthy embraced social and influencer advertising and marketing, the company-wide shift is welcome information.
“We’ve all the time been a model that has been on the forefront of tradition,” Assalini mentioned. “We all the time pioneer new issues, new guidelines of working, new social tendencies, and this can be a good instance of us doing one thing that no model at Unilever and actually, any model, has accomplished at this stage.”
