Old Spice: How to Make Money by Creating Male Anxiety

Old Spice has unrolled a new marketing campaign for their “Ever Clear” deodorant that serves as a textbook example for how to create a market for a product. Like many antiperspirant/deodorants marketed to women, Ever Clear claims to eliminate the residue left behind in the underarm that can end up on clothes or be visually unattractive. Here’s a print image from the campaign:

The television commercials are only five seconds long, offer no imagery like that in the print ads, and don’t even say “Old Spice.” Attempting to create some sort of viral marketing campaign, they merely reference the corporate website. Here’s a compilation of the ads:

More after the jump.

That website is highly interactive, presenting a series of bizarre and humorous “moments” that the user encounters when clicking on various parts of the screen. All of them, however, and just like in the print campaign, are based around creating male anxiety. Here’s some screen captures of the results:

The first image activates your webcam, and then tells you how ugly you are. The second brings up an “ad” for a dating service for lonely singles. The third pops up a series of video clips of a man rubbing his hairy belly. These are just a a few of the interactive options, but I found them to be particularly pertinent. Each of these, along with the print ads, creates a distinct sense of humiliation and embarrassment (cloaked, as usual for manvertising, in humor) for the viewer — a humiliation that can only be alleviated by using the product. Each of the interactive images I pulled and present here encapsulate the specifics of those anxieties.

First, there’s a direct challenge to the attractiveness of the viewer. Key to understanding this humiliation is that, presumably, the webcam will be taking an image of the viewer’s face, as it did here with mine. As the user will not be using the product on his face, this tactic makes little obvious sense, unless it is understood as a manvertising tactic: the message has very little to do with the product, and a great deal to do with insecurity about masculinity. Yet there’s a little bit of a needle-off-the-record moment happening here, too, about the insecurities of appearance, which is not typically something associated with “real man” behavior. I’ll come back to that.

Second, the “dating service” makes a direct appeal to sexual and emotional anxieties. Deodorant residue, it seems, leads to a lonely life without sex or partnership. Interestingly, the fake ad offers some potentially disruptive options (notice it lets a man seek a man, for one thing), which is an unusual detail for manvertising, but not unheard of — particularly for grooming products.

The third image, though, of the hairy belly being rubbed, wipes out a lot of the potential for disruption by presenting a man’s body as disturbing, annoying, and grotesque. The fact that the body is hairy emphasizes its maleness, and punctuates the supposed “irony” that the image is not supposed to be titillating (though, I would point out to Old Spice, they have no control over what their audiences decide). That third anxiety, then, isn’t as obvious as the first two, and makes little logical sense, but the point is still there, lurking under the surface, that homophobia is circulating somewhere in the discourse.

The product page on the Old Spice website makes these points even more clear (no pun intended). Here’s an image of that page:

The language here emphasizes the strategy: the product “allows you share all that your armpits have to offer the ladies.” If that’s deliberately stupid and even obnoxious, that’s because those are the essential qualities of manvertising. Exaggeration and humor convey serious messages that appear ridiculous. The other two lines — about hummingbirds and axe murderers — are clearly planted to cover for and blunt the primary message: this product will get you women.

But what about the stereotypically unmanly obsession with appearance that’s laden all over this campaign? As scholars such as R.W. Connell have pointed out, hegemonic masculinity isn’t something that exists naturally, rising up with every new generation of men. It’s cultivated, constructed, and manufactured, in part by corporations interested in building bottom lines. Old Spice is one of many grooming product manufacturers who have gambled on breaking the stereotypes. It’s how they do it, of course, that interests me. These are deliberate choices, after all, and the company does not have to use manvertising techniques.

And yet apparently they feel like they have to, as market analysts have discussed. The anxieties men feel about worrying too much about their appearance, about their body, is very real — at least in the minds of corporate brand managers. Thus a market must be manufactured: men did not realize that armpit residue was a problem, so a campaign must be created to tap into a very conventional set of anxieties and lead to big purchasing numbers. As grooming products get increasingly gendered, it’s interesting to see how the various campaigns play on those anxieties, and craft campaigns around gendered tensions, reinforcing stereotypes and associations.

Ultimately, there’s no real reason for it. Isn’t it enough just to say that the product won’t turn your dark colored shirts white in the underarms? Or that if you wear a tank top you won’t have unattractive armpits? Manvertising, as this campaign illustrates, requires a whole slew of other elements, all offset by humor, that tap into deep cultural fantasies and beliefs, in the interests of both creating and offsetting anxieties about masculinity.

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