I was reading an old NY Times Magazine and came across an article talking about the Phillips Norelco Bodygroom – a shaver for all those parts of the man besides his face. You may say, who cares. Well the part that was interesting about this article and the way that this product was promoted was the use of the internet. Via New York Times

Phillips created a website ShaveEverywhere.com that has a video of the “Robe Guy” who talks about his need and excitement of this new product. The article notes that this ad would probably have not passed muster on TV and very few stations would have picked it up. But, hey on the net, well, it is another ball game.

The approach Phillips used was to contact what they called “contextually relevant” websites like CollegeHumor.com amongst others. In fact this is for a product whose market barely existed a year ago, and now they are selling close to 250,000 of the things. According to Phillips over 60 percent of the buyers say that they learned about the product via ShaveEverywhere.com. Ultimately what the article noted was that “an online campaign has less chance of reaching people who might be indifferent to it”.

I think what this article illustrated nicely is the power of creating conversation around a product and the flexibility of the internet as a marketing medium. You after all have no restrictions on what you can put in an ad online – there are no FCC rules to worry about. There is such control and freedom within the net that anything goes – and came be ignored, deleted or skipped over.

AbrahamHarrison for me seems to really get this – creating conversation in the internet medium – it is a powerful tool and is something that companies are increasingly realizing. Putting your product out there, sending it off to people who would find it relevant can really start a conversation. The power of conversation is endless – this is just another example of that. I feel sorry for TV advertising as it seems so weak compared to this.

**All quotes and references are from the article in the NY Times Magazine, 8.5.07, “Buzz Marketing” by Rob Walker”

The Way We Live Now: Consumed; Buzz Marketing

By ROB WALKER

About a year ago, Philips Norelco began the push to sell a device called the Bodygroom as a product to help men shave areas of the body other than the face. At the time, according to Jim Olstrom, director of the home division of the retail-data collection firm NPD Group, the idea of a product specifically made for below-the-neck shaving barely existed. Today, the Bodygroom is one of at least four products in what’s seen as a distinct and fast-growing category; nearly 250,000 body-hair trimmers have been bought in the United States in the last year, according to NPD data (which does not count Wal-Mart). ”Nobody was talking about this category,” Olstrom says. ”Now it’s completely out in the open.”

All of this suggests a problem that no one was aware of before its solution went on sale. But Michelle Schwartz, a Philips Norelco brand manager, maintains that this is not so. She says the company, in the course of research into what was missing from the ”grooming portfolio” of the typical male consumer, concluded that ”over half the guys we were talking to between the ages of 20 and 50 were doing some body-hair maintenance.” Moreover, they were not happy with their options. Waxing, for example, was painful. Scissors and razor blades, she notes, ”are very, very dangerous, especially if you take them to certain areas of the body.” According to Schwartz, this problem had previously eluded widespread notice among, say, makers of shaving devices, because men were too embarrassed to talk about it.

How to puncture this conspiracy of silence? Marketing. Specifically, Philips Norelco’s online campaign involving a video at a Web site called ShaveEverywhere.com. This site, started in May of last year, features a young man in a bathrobe who explains the benefits of using the Bodygroom on the back, underarms and other body parts that are bleeped out. (As in: Robe Guy credits it with giving him an ”extra optical inch on my BLEEP.”) It’s easy to decode the bleeps, even without the images of peaches and carrots that pop up onscreen. Maybe this would pass muster on Comedy Central, and maybe it wouldn’t. But it’s extremely hard to imagine a staid public company like Philips putting a message like this on television. On the Internet, however, it was a huge hit. ”We went to Web sites that we considered contextually relevant,” Schwartz says, citing CollegeHumor.com as an example. The company also alerted ”The Howard Stern Show,” which devoted a satellite-radio segment to the online video on the day it made its debut. The link was e-mailed far and wide.

It’s often hard to tell whether the increasing amount of widely e-mailed locker-room humor that’s created by ad agencies really has much effect on sales. But in this case, Philips Norelco claims that 60 percent of Bodygroom buyers say they learned about the product via ShaveEverywhere.com. Schwartz says the key is that the site offered not merely ”goofy humor,” but empathy: Robe Guy is a friendly Everyman, and if he’s comfortable with this all-over-shaving thing, shouldn’t you be? Plus, she suggests, an online campaign has less chance of reaching people who might be indifferent to it — or maybe even annoyed or offended by it — than a television spot would. Maybe. At least there’s no Standards and Practices Department to worry about.

The Bodygroom is now widely available at drugstores and big-box retailers, which featured it heavily in store circulars prior to Father’s Day this year. In June, there was a 50 percent spike in sales. But there’s not much in the way of in-store promotion — like a life-size cardboard cutout of Robe Guy. (”We tried,” Schwartz says, laughing. ”That didn’t go over very well” with retailers.) This summer Philips Norelco released a second online video full of bawdy bleeping — a faux documentary involving outrageously hairy men prowling the Coney Island Boardwalk in the pre-Bodygroom era. But the company has run no television or print advertising for the product and has no plans to. Perhaps Robe Guy makes more sense as a direct-marketing mascot than as a mass-media icon.

Novelty and boundary-pushing aside, the strategy has done one of marketing’s traditional jobs, clearly linking a product to a particular use. The Bodygroom and its rivals are more variations on electric shavers than technological breakthroughs, and manuals for plenty of the beard and mustache trimmers that have been around for years note that those devices can be used below the neck; they’ve just never been sold that way. ”This is a great example of repurposing technology,” says NPD Group’s Olson. ”It has everything to do with marketing.”

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