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Man Brands!

Posted By: Simon WhiteOctober 25th, 2011

Selling beauty products to men has to be one of the hardest jobs in sales and marketing. Between you and me I have used women’s exfoliating cream before and yeah, it was nice… It was too nice! It smelled like summer fruits and baby deers it was called something rubbish like ‘fairy dreams’ or ‘butterfly fresh’. Having decided it was time to grow up and stop using my house mates face cream I thought I would go to boots and find a face scrub that was for MEN.

Usually with things like moisturiser, if it says ‘For MEN’ on the bottle then that’s good enough for me but face scrub seems different. I  wanted something that would say ‘I am a man’ I wanted it to feel like I was scrubbing my face with sandpaper or grout, I wanted it to be a challenge, I wanted the experience to be something that had to be endured not enjoyed. I wanted it to be made of crushed bricks and called ‘Rubble’.

After 15 minutes of looking totally lost I found what I was after, a Face Scrub that said, ‘Simon, you da man!’ Did it have a special skin freshening formula? who cares, It was called ‘BULLDOG’ what more could I want. I remember leaving the store and feeling excited about finding the most manly beauty product on the market, this is going to hurt, bring on the pain, If I’m going to look after my skin I want to have to take it like a man.

Having decided that I needed a comparison I went out and brought a different brand of face scrub, this time it was called simply ‘Face Scrub’ and to my surprise it was everything I wanted Bulldog to be. It was thick painful and resists application.

So what have I learnt about male beauty products, well they are sold in predominately two ways, either they play of off a mans insecurity by appealing to his masculinity with names like Bulldog (I fell for that one), or they take the plain and simple, no nonsense, lets not make a fuss route.

Just so you know, four weeks have passed and although they haven’t said it I think the ladies in the studio think I’m 5% better looking and twice as manly.

Tags: Branding, marketing
Posted in Creative