The emperor’s new fragrance: Old Spice’s campaign failure

Hello Cathie …

I should come out and say that I work at W+K. On THAT brand.

I found your article interesting … as much for your suggestion of how you would have “improved” the campaign [“Tell us what you want to smell like”] as well as your evaluation on it’s overall success. Or lack of, as you suggest.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it sounds awfully like your view for effectiveness is [1] only think in the short term and [2] use promotional mechanics at every opportunity.

I’m not going to get in to a pubic discussion about this, but if you’d like to chat some more, let me know, it would be interesting.

Thanks.

Please, no pubic discussions

Has it dawned on the author that “finding out what consumers actually want to smell like, then deliver it to them, market by market. would be exorbitantly expensive, let alone bordering on the impossible?

Life must be great on her planet.

Hi Cathie

In fact I agree, and at the time made verbal comments to the effect of “but who do you know that is now using Old Spice because of these ads” and even more importantly months later “are they still”?.

Ultimately when a business conducts marketing and advertising activities they do it for one reason alone. Yes yes.. brand engagement, reach, recognition … ultimately they do it to sell their product.

Short term / Long term everything they do is to sell the product.

If this campaign didn’t end up with a bug success in more people buying their product during the campaigns and now later, and next year then I think the campaign can be called unsuccessful.

Thanks for the post.

Great article Cathie, really interesting to read a different point of view on a much-lauded campaign. Way to stir up those giant creative egos.

Just wanted to say Cathie has written to me.

We’re “discussing and debating”.

I am a 32 year old male. I loved the Old Spice marketing campaign. I would never buy the product due to it’s fragrance. Nuff said.

Most of the stuff we produce is absolute garbage and shames us all. I know this campaign was over-hyped but who cares. it looked fun and we can use it to convice clients to do fun stuff. Who gives a shit if it sold anything.

The old phrase “you can’t polish a turd” springs to mind.

Although apparently Myth Busters proved that you could in fact polish a turd, so maybe there is hope for Old Spice yet!

This seems to make some strident assumptions about the campaign objectives and measurement.

Maybe Rob can elucidate?

Maybe their objective was to build a 1.8 million strong database for all future marketing activity?

My 16 year old sons loved the campaign and therefore bought Old Spice as their first fragrance. They have no idea of it’s past perception. They think the name is cool.
And it smells a lot better than some of the other costly rubbish out there. I think it was genius.

By “flatline” Cathie, are you saying the sales figures went back to their pre-campaign (with or without vouchers) levels or that once they hit a level, they more or less stayed there?

My question is, are their sales levels overall higher after the campaign, or are they back at their levels before the campaign started?

In my amateur view “more than before” is a success to some degree, in terms of product awareness, whether the business model can support it or not, and I suspect they were prepared for the loss leader to get into bathroom shelves and build affinity.

Regardless of the product being vouchered at below RRP, they may still have made a (slimmer) profit as, lets face it, smelly soap isn’t that expensive to make. More worrying would be a downwards slope, which is definitely unsustainable.

You hit the nail on the head.. fun campaign… but it still reminds me of old men sitting round a table drinking whiskey….. forgot to mention, it still smells like Old Spice.

Maybe they need to steal an ad idea from Mother, where they hunt down the geriatric that made Old Spice smell like Old Spice, murder him/her using flying ninjas and then create a new fragrance.

Let them have their fun Adgrunt.

Interesting article Cathie.

I’ve never seen any evidence to contradict the maxim that all good marketing will do for a bad product is make it fail quicker. That P&G, a company not known for its profligacy, keeps supporting Old Spice suggests that something must be working.

As to WHY its working – social media, couponing, shelf positioning, viral buzz, PR etc – is something for the respective agencies to fight over. That a tired, old fashioned and undoubtedly old smelling product can grow at all is a credit, ultimately, to the client. I’d be interested to compare MAT sales / profit figures before the total program was launched vs.after before calling it a success or failure.

The Old Spice man viral campaign has been justifiably lauded for its brilliant creativity but surely looking at it in isolation from every other element of the program falls into the age-old myopic agency trick of ‘if it works, it’s the advertising, if it doesn’t it’s everyone else’s fault.’

Final point, if Old Spice marketers had gone down the traditional route, would we still be talking about it?

Hi Cathie,

Although I am not in the advertising area I thought I may comment on this one. It seems like the marketing campaign was targetting a similar demographic to Lynx which have done very well with the teen to mid 20s male market. I work with a sporting organisation and have found guys in this age bracket are now wearing Old Spice as they see it as being cool rather than the cheesy Lynx ads. There were many in this age range that treated him as a star and made the trip to Bondi Beach to see him.

It is probably the 30-45yr olds that remember their fathers or grandfather wearing this and I think Old Spice would have wasted their money if they tried to target us with their grandfatherly scent.

cool story bro. and by bro I mean Cathie.

@JJ, Interesting you see guys wearing Old Spice as a result of an Old Spice Shower product.

If you see guys “wearing” Old Spice shower products, I’m worried, seriously worried for the youth of Australia.

And you’re right.: the Dad/Grandad connotations of Old Spice are among the 35+ year olds, the 25 & unders missed that scene. Just like the Axe and Lynx users are unaware of the Hai Karate products from the 70’s their products mimic. see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtwh3nQP5Uo

LET’S HAVE A PUBIC DISCUSSION!!!!!!!!!!!! Sounds like more fun than a regular discussion.

What’s wrong with VB Cathy? It’s a great drop.

I would say as usual it’s a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. The advertising may have persuaded some people to reconsider the brand, the voucher got them in the supermarket door. Whether they come back of course is up to how the product delivers. So where there just short term sales objectives? or longer terms goals in terms of purchase and preference.

what’s next, will Cathie dare suggest that the NAB break-up campaign wasn’t a roaring success but instead back-fired because it was disingenous and short-term?

Much of the brilliance of the Old Spice campaign was having to earn not pay for media. Perhaps that’s why so many of the media agencies slam it.
Behind every criticism is a motive.

I’d be interested to know where you got these figures from. I was under the impression you couldn’t buy any Old Spice products in Australia apart from deodorant (perhaps I’ve been misinformed)

I think the campaign is fantastically successful. A whole heap of guys buy Lynx based on their ads, why wouldn’t it work for Old Spice? Lynx is pretty much crap in a bottle and I’ve yet to find a woman who doesn’t loathe the smell of it.

Aside from this campaign they have got a ton of really funny and talked about ads that work well with men aged 20 -35. I’d buy it.

Cathie, your logic reminds me of a famous quote from Henry Ford – “If I had asked consumers what they wanted, they’d have asked for a faster horse”.

Cathie who?

As the saying goes, anyone can be a retrospective genius.

Cathie, would love to see some examples of work you’ve done so we can benchmark against this campaign……feel free to post on this thread.

Things I liked about the Campaign in retrospect, although not a product I buy.

1. It targeted the buyer (can be any age) unlike the (seemingly) geriatric user.
2. It was rollicking FUN. Fun is good. Anywhere . . anytime. . any age.
3. It shone a favourable light on the under-loved elders who remain loyal to a product (banks take note please). Get with it . . . the cult of advanced style is growing.
4. Ongoing reiteration in the public memory buds. That’s good should I ever need after shave.

I reckon if you can take a 73 year old brand and make it cool again, and produce one of the most talked about and awarded and well-crafted campaigns ever, and do one of the most interesting and innovative social media campaigns ever for that same 73 year old product, and if you can get main grocery buyers to like the campaign as well and think about the kind of body wash they’re buying for their blokes (remember, it was “the man your man could smell like”), and if you can even get my wife (who is the acid test on these matters and hates most ads I don’t do) to say it’s funny, well, then, I think most of us would be pretty happy to put our name to that kind of failure.

Look again. I’m on a horse.

@Rich

Are you trying to tell me Henry Ford used the word “consumers”? Hardly! Oh, and there appears to be no evidence he said it, either: http://www.quora.com/Quotation.....ster-horse

@jean cave seems to have hit the nail on the head.

I’v read some of Cathie’s stuff before and she has incredible insight, so I don’t think she missed the mark to say the product and the content were not connected. However, that is different to noticing the campaign was entertaining and engaging and, most importantly, repeatable, as people returned to their favourites for another viewing.

Whether it increased market share for the product I have no idea, but people are talking about OldSpice and no-one confuses the ads with another product, so there is some connection, even if only the brand and label.

And they kept the whistling sailor theme at the end, how clever was that? Definitely connection!

Tall poppie syndrome at its best Cathie – sure there could have been some slightly better executed components, and it’s a brand that was never going to sway your opinion – however:

If you’ve ever spent any time client side – and understand the challenge to balance short term commercial marketing and long term value creation – then you would have sold your mother for a campaign like this.

Bollocks!!! I brought “old spice” in fact it’s sitting in the car right now. Don’t know if I’ll ever use it again but got swept up in the whole thing. I’m sure I was not he only one.
This may seem a tad too simple, but awareness and moving sh*t, is’nt that the point?

I think strategically the campaign was bang on. It focused on the essence of Old Spice – Masculinity. Something that hasn’t changed in 50 years.

A friend from the US recounted a story to me where he was on a bus with a whole heap of guys after a ball game and the driver (an african american woman said) “yall smell” He replied ‘we smell the way men should”. The driver replied ‘No, Old Spice smells the way a man should!”

No doubt in each country the connection with the brand is different. I always saw Old Spice as my dad’s brand and never used it while growing it as a result. But after he passed away and I became a father, I saw the ad again and the emotional connection with it was revived – and big time.

So what did I do? Rush out and buy a bottle which I’m, happy to say I still splash on every morning. Why? Because its got an ageless scent and it represents masculinity – the way real men – like my dad (and I’m sure yours) – defined it.

I think Cathie’s missed the whole point of Old Spice. The fact that it reminds you of your (or her) dad – for a certain age group – is not a bad thing. The brand cannot get away from the fact that it’s 73 years old – so why try? Use that heritage and the emotional connection within it to advantage instead – that I think is what the brand rather than the ad has successfully done.

It’s the old story of the product needing to live up to the hype. Marketing will only get the foot in the door, but the product is what keeps it there.

I enjoyed the read but would love to see the numbers – does anyone know the true ROI for the campaign so far?

So “Much of the brilliance of the Old Spice campaign was having to earn not pay for media”??

this is what PR firms have been doing for donkey’s years isn’t it?

Interesting piece. Cathie I struggle to grok your “doesn’t connect” sentiment. The real value in the campaign(s) is that P&G know they need to change a generation of buyers… they probably aren’t trying to deliver 1 to 4 quarters of a marginal sales bump like most campaign goals.

Your coupon sentiment is valid but is misleading as it needs to be taken into account that P&G is a coupon driven business. They run a lot of products that way and have forever.

If they can keep the Old Spice brand fresh over time with succession campaigns they won’t go down as an Internet meme… they will go down as the business e-book on betting the farm on long term mindshare.

I think it really depends on your audience. I’m 28. My grandfather wore old spice.

I went and actually reevaluated the product because of this ad. It smelt like my grandfather. So I didn’t buy it.

However, I’d suggest that the younger gen z group are likely to NOT have an association with old spice and old men. I think this campaign is a really effective way of getting a portion of audience who hadn’t smelt the fragrance before.

I would say the raised brand awareness achieved the required result on myself, but I just didn’t convert due to personal reasons essentially. Was I the target audience though?

This thread is brilliant example of how much you can learn from a “public discussion” if you just keep an open mind for a minute and consider all views. You rarely get the truth from someone with a vested interested.