"I love my job!" George says. "You will have to drag me kicking and screaming from this job."
Unilever is so enthusiastic in its use of provocative, outlandish sexual images that it hired a consultant to police advertisements for signs of excessive lewdness.
"They wanted to make sure they weren't doing anything offensive," says Jane Buckingham, trend consultant and founder of the market research firm Youth Intelligence. Unilever didn't think the advertising would offend 18-to-24-year-olds, but the company worried about what other people would say. "The ads are a little sexy and a little un-PC and it was at a time when people were being hyper-PC. And it was a new category," Buckingham says.
By now, "it's gotten to the point where I tell them, 'You guys know the fine line really well,' " Buckingham says. Then she admits, "Occasionally, I go, 'Oops!' "
In Unilever's deodorant division, Axe already is the No. 1 seller, surpassing sales of the company's traditional brands -- Degree, Dove and Suave. And in the close fight for supremacy in the more than $1 billion world of men's deodorants, Axe rose to No. 1 in 2004, surpassing Right Guard and Old Spice, according to A.C. Nielsen Corp. So far his year, it has slipped to No. 2, behind Old Spice.
Axe's success has inspired other companies to grab for a piece of that exceedingly smelly market. Last year, Old Spice introduced Red Zone deodorant body spray. This year, Gillette unveiled Tag. An advertisement for Tag in the May issue of Cargo magazine shows a young man with dirty blond hair wearing a plaid shirt -- and what is dangerously close to a puka-shell necklace -- being tackled by an entire women's volleyball team whose members bear expressions of orgiastic delight.
The fight for deodorant body spray dominance is on.
Axe's rise to the top was facilitated by vanity loosed. The men's grooming market was primed for new products aimed at a generation of young men who do not treat personal vanity as a sign of effeminacy or a dirty secret. While high-end brands such as Clinique, Kiehl's and John Allan's have catered to men who want to inject luxury and pampering into their daily grooming routines, the mass market has been lacking.
"In rural America, you may not even be exposed to Kiehl's," Buckingham says. Axe is something "anybody can afford and everyone is exposed to." There it is at the local CVS, at Wal-Mart, on Drugstore.com.
But the success of Axe is based on more than geography. It benefited from a fragrance "Nose" -- the scent industry's professional interpreters of the arcane language of fragrances. Axe's Nose is the same sniffer who helped concoct such prestigious Calvin Klein scents as Obsession and Eternity. And it was helped by the mundane fact that, in technical deodorant-speak, everyone considered the United States a "stick market."
"Aerosols -- that big, bug-spray-looking can -- were in decline," George says. "We spent a lot of time in front of our target audience and we realized: That generation hadn't thought of aerosols as a bad thing. They looked at it as a new form. They didn't have any baggage associated with the aerosol market." (Who could have imagined that aerosol deodorants came with issues ?)
"This was a very functional market, the deodorant market," George says. "Everybody was truly offering the same thing: stop odor and wetness, stop odor and wetness." Axe had the audacity to be an aerosol that promised to do more.
