As Cracker Barrel recently learned, moving away from what consumers want can turn a brand bland — unless that’s what a brand’s fans are clamoring for. Which is the case for a brand new rebrand by Axe, the Unilever line of men’s grooming products.
Axe today (Oct. 10) released a can designed in collaboration with Emily Zugay, a graphic designer who has gone viral on TikTok for her deadpan humor and absurdist tackle brand logos. In Axe’s case, the brand new limited-edition offering is a white can with a lone, clip art-style graphic of an axe, with retail displays that recast the brand’s name as “The Cologne People.”
The collaboration began with a TikTok post Zugay made in July by which she revealed the brand new axe-based logo and said the brand “wasn’t made for boys in middle school locker rooms — it was made for men.” The post notched greater than 5 million views, a half million likes and greater than 2,000 comments and quickly caught the brand’s attention.
“The response from our fans was really loud and clear,” said Dolores Assalini, head of Axe U.S. “They wanted the brand new logo, and we listened.”
Within 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 brand partnership thus far, Axe appointed the designer as its recent Big Boss — a fake position at the guts of a series of posts on the brand’s TikTok and Instagram pages — and made the can available for purchase on Walmart’s website.
“Brands that don’t take themselves too seriously and lean into meme culture really connect with people today,” Zugay said in a press release. “In a world oversaturated with traditional ads, it’s the brands that feel relatable and make us laugh or feel something that stick in our minds.”
Not only is the collaboration an example of social listening, a commonplace tactic within the social media era, but an acknowledgment of how the brand’s consumers — mostly young men — wish to interact with brands.
“Young guys today don’t need to only be spoken to. They wish to feel like they’re a part of the technique of creating brands,” Assalini said. “Gen Z guys and Gen Alpha guys really value online culture and influencer-driven trends, they usually want brands to collaborate with them and provides them what they need inside this space.”
Beyond authenticity
To give its target market what it wants, Axe has gone beyond the concentrate on authenticity bandied about by every brand marketer attempting to reflect consumer culture to attach at a deeper level with how its consumers live. Gen Z and Gen Alpha create content at a much higher level than past generations, they usually’re not only consumers of media — they wish to be a component of it, Assalini said.
“We’re not only showing up where they’re, speaking their language and using their memes, but we’re reflecting the culture that they are creating, and mixing that with who we’re as a brand,” she explained.
To expand the collaboration, Axe has adopted one other popular marketer tactic, using social and influencer content to amplify its broader efforts. Zugay’s content with Axe plays into fan lore concerning the idea of Axe’s “big boss,” further embedding the trouble into consumers’ relationship with the brand.
“It’s not only a one-and-done — ‘we’re making them, we’re selling it.’ We’re creating an entire story and entertainment cycle around it,” Assalini said. “It’s adding value when it comes to making a story, but it surely’s also encouraging them to interact and proceed to be a component of this process. In every post that we do, we’re getting engagement for our community.”
This variety of social-first marketing is quickly becoming imperative for CPG marketers. Axe’s parent company Unilever made waves this 12 months when CEO Fernando Fernandez said the corporate would shift half of its ad spend to social and multiply its work with influencers 20 fold. For Unilever brands like Dove and Axe which have long embraced social and influencer marketing, the company-wide shift is welcome news.
“We have all the time been a brand that has been on the forefront of culture,” Assalini said. “We all the time pioneer recent things, recent rules of working, recent social trends, and this can be a perfect example of us doing something that no brand at Unilever and really, any brand, has done at this level.”
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