“Who yer callin' a sparrow, you schmuck?!”
The bird on the back.
May 04 2005
Wednesday
Children’s deodorant, blogs and iPods
Adriana Cronin-Lukas • Blogs & Blogging • Blogs in the media • Marketing & PR 
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That’s it. The blogs have arrived now as a legitimate weapon for P&G against Unilever’s Axe, the fastest-growing deodorant brand in the US. The Axe brand was built around funny ads showing young men they can use body spray to attract women. Now, rival Procter & Gamble Co. is betting on body spray to attract girls to its Secret brand.

P&G is using Secret Sparkle Body Spray and its range of teeny-bopper-oriented scents to lure entry-level consumers for the segment-leading women’s deodorant. To do so, it’s using an unusual campaign that includes sampling and iPod giveaways via fast-growing tween fashion mecca Limited Too as well as animated TV ads and the brand’s first blog marketing.

The brand’s first blog marketing! Be still my beating heart! How on earth are they doing it? By getting hold of the hapless teenagers and spraying them into submission. Wait, I lie, they ‘target’ them during their ‘formative years’:

“Girls have started using deodorant younger and younger,” said Dave Knox, assistant brand manager at P&G overseeing the body-spray launch. “It used to be 12 or 13 was kind of the entry point, and that’s slowly ratcheted down each year. ... If you don’t target the consumer in her formative years, you’re not going to be relevant through the rest of her life.”

I mean, a brand’s gotta do, what a brand’s gotta do. Be relevant or die. But they are certainly novel and innovative using ‘non-traditional’ media:

P&G isn’t using the blatant sexual innuendos found in ads for Unilever’s Axe… Instead, it’s using tamer animated ads from Secret’s shop, Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett, Chicago (planning and buying by sibling Starcom Mediavest Group, New York), which broke earlier this month on cable and network programs targeted toward older teens, such as WB Network and MTV.

[/sarcasm]. Oh wait, but where are the blogs? This must be it:

The body sprays are also integrated into a popular tween online hangout, Neopets.com, as a reward for which girls can redeem the “Neopoints” they earn. P&G last week launched Secret’s first blog-marketing program at SparkleBody-Spray.com.

So, I tried SparkleBody-Spray.com but no luck. Searching in Google I get to here. Still I see no blogs…

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