AXE Keeps Its Core Demographic in Focus When Selecting Marketing Channels

In Part One of this article series, “Choosing the Right Medium for Your B2C Audience,” I wrote about choosing and integrating the right mediums to reach your target audience.

One consumer brand that has mastered the selection and integration of marketing mediums is AXE. If you’re the parent of a teenage or young adult male, you may already be familiar with AXE body products, shampoos and antiperspirants.

AXE’s racy ads have their share of critics. Nonetheless, Unilever, the company that makes AXE, has done a great job integrating traditional advertising with cutting edge technology to target its core demographic: socially connected and technologically savvy 18-24-year-old males.

Traditional marketing: TV and magazines

AXE’s marketers heavily promote the brand across various mediums, both old and new. But all AXE media buys and placements are carefully chosen: They only put their money where young males hang out. And young males still watch TV and read magazines.

In his article, “AXE vs. Old Spice: Whose Media Plan Came Up Smelling Best?,” writer Antony Young reports that in 2010 the brand “slam dunked the media with a high reaching and comprehensive TV and magazine program.” AXE put a whopping 40% of its TV buy into syndicated cable re-runs where young males flock: Family Guy, South Park and King of the Hill.

In addition to cable TV shows, the brand also runs print ads in magazines targeting its demographic, including Playboy, GQ, Men’s Fitness and Maxim.

Entertainment via cutting-edge technology

AXE also recognizes that its target market expects more from advertising than simple busty images. In his Mobile Marketer article, “Unilever Breaks Largest US Multichannel Ad Program Using Mobile Bar Codes,” Dan Butcher states, “In order for Axe to stay relevant to the brand’s target guy, it needs to constantly innovate and find new ways and channels to entertain him where he works, lives and plays.”

AXE has risen to the challenge. For example, the company incorporates Jagtag 2D bar codes into product samples, in-theater posters and on-campus materials. With this technology, AXE’s consumer base (who are heavy text users) can use any type of phone to “request and immediately receive multimedia content — video, audio, pictures, coupons and text — via MMS.”

In another visually stimulating and, let’s face it, very, very cool product promotion, Unilever incorporated augmented reality for its “When Angels Fall” campaign.

For this campaign, AXE marketers placed a “Look Up” decal on the floor of London’s Victoria subway station. By standing on the decal, commuters could see themselves on a large video screen – along with a holographic female angel who magically appears at their side. View the video below for a behind-the-scenes look at this spectacular use of technology.

Social media also key for reaching audience

Not surprising, Unilever also utilizes online and social media marketing to reach its “always on,” socially connected target audience. It has successfully integrated the brand’s website with Facebook, Twitter, and banner ads.

The over 1.8 million fans of AXE’s Facebook page can access the brand’s videos, post on the brand’s Facebook wall and, if they’re fast enough, grab one of the 2,000 coupons the company doles out each week. This promotion is so popular that it sometimes shuts down the company’s server.

AXE’s social media success is due in part to the fact that it responds to all mentions and call-outs on Twitter (and Facebook, too). You can tell from its tweets that Unilever employs someone who speaks the language of its demographic, which keeps the brand fresh, hip, relevant and on-target.

Banner ads run across multiple online properties and direct AXE’s target audience to click through to special campaigns, such as its YouTube “Clean Your Balls” fake infomercial, which received over 1.5 million views with minimal promotion.

What can you learn from AXE?

Know your target audience. AXE’s audience expects to be entertained. Understanding this expectation focuses the brand’s marketing campaigns — while allowing it to take risks.

Know where your audience hangs out online and off. AXE puts it marketing budget where its demographic lives, including TV and magazines. They continue to do this even when “experts” say that print and TV are dead. As I stated in Part One of this article, if you have an older demographic, it does pay to advertise in newspapers as this demographic continues to read newspapers.

Stay with a simple message. AXE’s message is as old as advertising itself: You’re more desirable if you use our product. Whether it’s promoting through traditional mediums (such as print ads) or new mediums (such as fake YouTube infomercials), AXE never deviates from this core message.

Do you follow a brand that successfully integrates various marketing channels? Feel free to leave your comments below.