Now Back to Sales

July 30, 2010 by Angel Micarelli

"Look at your man, now back to me, now back to your man, now back to me." If you’ve watched any television at all in the last six months, you’ll recognize that as the Old Spice commercial. It’s a sensation. The actor who portrays the Old Spice Guy is famous, even appearing on that Holy Grail of media exposure, Ellen. It is a fantastic example of utilizing social media to maximum effect. Old Spice Guy rules YouTube (with 116,281,266 total upload views) and interacts with fans in real-time on Twitter and Facebook. The country has Old Spice fever.

But—look at your campaign, now back to me, now back to your campaign, now back to me. According to Procter and Gamble, women purchase body wash for men, ergo I am the target market. But I’m not buying it. Literally. My husband handles his personal hygiene (quite well, I might add) and his philosophy is a man should smell, well, not smelly. Soap works just fine. So he’s not buying it either. And apparently, he’s not the only one. Advertising news service WARC reports sales of Old Spice’s Red Zone After Hours Body Wash have not only not risen or even stayed flat—sales have fallen 7 percent.

What happened? It’s undeniable that this campaign has raised brand awareness in a positive way. But brand awareness is just part of the puzzle. Much as we’d like to supply the magic bullet as marketers, it does indeed take a village to sell a product. A myriad of factors including pricing, naming, competitive positioning and packaging play a role. And let’s not forget product performance. I don’t know what Old Spice smells like (my dad was an English Leather guy), but maybe consumers don’t love the product as much as the advertising. If the experience doesn’t match the promise, you don’t have a sustainable brand.

Some business school will undoubtedly do a case study on the Old Spice Guy campaign. Until the final verdict on its ROI is in, we can learn from the campaign’s use of integrated media, how it has leveraged PR opportunities and how it shook up a tired brand. Smells like a recipe for success to me, but we’ll have to wait and see.

A senior writer at Seidler Bernstein and an accomplished communications strategist and writer with a talent for conveying complex clinical products, technologies, and issues, Angel Micarelli has a track record of helping to create integrated branding and multi-channel marketing to support domestic and international sales. She's adept at using competitive profiling, target research, stakeholder goals and the clinical landscape to build blueprints for effective campaigns.

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