Old Spice appeals to women despite marketing for men

Procter & Gamble Co. Old Spice brand antiperspirant and deodorant sits on display in a supermarket in Princeton, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013. Procter & Gamble Co., the worldís largest consumer-products maker, said fiscal first-quarter profit rose 7.6 percent as sales of home-care goods and baby products gained. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Procter & Gamble Co. Old Spice brand antiperspirant and deodorant sits on display in a supermarket in Princeton, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013. Procter & Gamble Co., the worldís largest consumer-products maker, said fiscal first-quarter profit rose 7.6 percent as sales of home-care goods and baby products gained. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

“Helloooo, ladies!” is the come-on intoned by the buff actor in Procter & Gamble Co.’s Old Spice commercials, imploring women to stock up on the men’s grooming products for their significant others.

It turns out, though, that some are stocking up for themselves.

Young women are embracing Old Spice - long known as the brand their dads kept in the medicine cabinet - even as P&G’s marketing continues to focus on their male peers.

Sarah Olivieri, who started an “Old Spice for Women” Facebook page, said she came to the product for health reasons after searching for a deodorant that wasn’t an antiperspirant. Its relatively low price and newer scents also appeal to Old Spice’s fans.

“There’s a lot of women out there, who, for different reasons, like to use Old Spice,” said Olivieri, 33, who runs a media company in Rifton, N.Y.

The brand’s female inroads represent a small positive for P&G’s struggling beauty division, which accounts for about 23 percent of the Cincinnati-based company’s revenue. The unit’s sales declined 2 percent in the six months that ended Dec. 31 from the year-earlier period. P&G’s stock has fallen almost 3 percent this year. It was little changed Wednesday in New York trading, closing at $79.24.

The whole industry is contending with sluggish growth over the next four years, underscoring the need to find new buyers for its wares. Sales of home-care products are forecast to rise just 2.4 percent a year from 2014 to 2018, according to Euromonitor International.

Cultivating unintended audiences is a delicate process. While pushing a brand’s boundaries can fuel growth, the risk is alienating the existing market. The new-found customers also might not want to be courted directly, said Delia Passi, founder of Medelia Inc., a firm in Hollywood, Fla., that advises corporations on selling to women.

“Once you go out with a marketing campaign around it, then it’s not cool anymore,” she said.

While P&G declined to comment, the company isn’t discouraging its new audience. At one point, P&G posted a link to Olivieri’s site on its brand page.

Other products have successfully built audiences outside the confines of their brand’s target gender. Take Febreze, the odor-neutralizing line of products that’s also made by P&G. While the company marketed it toward women for housecleaning, some men spray it on their clothing to delay doing laundry. In Vietnam, where the product is known as Ambi Pur, it’s caught on as a deodorizing spray for the helmets worn by riders of the country’s ubiquitous motor scooters.

Bag Balm, developed to soothe sore cows’ udders, became a popular skin softener for humans and their dogs. Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s Kleenex, meanwhile, was initially seen as a disposable cleaning tissue.

Old Spice’s trip to the female market began after an image makeover. Long associated with middle-aged men, Old Spice began a new campaign in 2010 starring actor Isaiah Mustafa as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” The first spot, where Mustafa advises that “anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady,” has drawn 48 million YouTube views. The campaign also has ad pitches like “Smellcome to Manhood” and “Old Spice Made a Man of My Son,” a commercial featuring moms spying on their kids during dates.

For men, using a product that’s embraced by women can carry a stigma, said Jill Avery, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who has studied the concept of what she calls “gender contamination.”

When Porsche’s Cayenne sport utility vehicle became popular with women in 2003, the company “experienced a lot of outcry from its existing users,” said Avery, who co-wrote a case study on the backlash. “People were unhappy that a different kind of driver would be coming into the family and the brand wouldn’t mean what it did in the past.”

If large numbers of women started using Old Spice, or if the company introduced an Old Spice for women or shifted to more unisex marketing, “you might see men leaving the brand because it doesn’t convey the masculinity that it did in the past,” she said. Bryan McCleary, a P&G spokesman, declined to comment on whether P&G is developing an Old Spice women’s line.

“A lot of the things we use are gendered,” whether that’s a brand or a category, Avery said. “If you think about what men are being told from a very young age, it’s being masculine is the antithesis of being feminine.”

Business, Pages 72 on 03/16/2014

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