The Old Spice Read

A man stands in a bathroom, wrapped in a towel, talking to you as though you are already half in love with him. Then he is on a boat. Then he is on a horse. It lasts thirty seconds, it is filmed to look like one unbroken take, and it never once explains what the product actually does.

That was Old Spice in February 2010, and the Old Spice rebrand is now taught as one of the great brand recoveries. The company had a problem that money alone had not solved: to younger men, Old Spice was the stuff their grandfather wore. The fix was not to argue the point. It was to choose one absurdly specific story and commit to it completely.

The campaign, made by the agency Wieden+Kennedy and built around the actor Isaiah Mustafa, was aimed at a person who does not use the product. Old Spice had found that around 60% of body wash was bought by women, frequently for the men in their lives. So the ad talks straight past its own user, to the woman holding the basket: your man could smell like this man.

The insight nobody else was chasing

Every other brand in the aisle was talking to men about men. Old Spice went the other way and narrowed: one narrator, one joke, one improbable monologue pointed at one specific buyer.

The reported target had been to lift body wash sales by roughly 15%. By that May, sales were reported up about 60% year on year, and by the end of 2010, Old Spice was the best-selling men’s body wash brand in the United States. A brand that smelled like your grandfather won by pretending to be a man on a horse.

The business edit

The instinct of a struggling brand is to widen — say more, reach a wider audience, and offend no one. Old Spice did the opposite. It picked a boundary and got very specific towards a certain audience.

This is the Boundary at work: a defined, small world seems larger to an audience than a sprawling one, because there is something particular to hold on to. One man, one bathroom, and one impossible take gave people more to grab onto than a decade of “trusted since 1937” ever had. The story was small enough to repeat and strange enough to remember.

Pick the one thing a stranger will remember, and let it earn the rest. Deciding what the story is really about is the edit described in the Narrative Read.

A rebrand rarely fails for lack of reach. It fails for lack of a story worth repeating. Old Spice did not go and find more customers. It found one thing to say, and said it to the person who was actually buying.

More brand decisions read as stories in the Business lane.