Old Spice talked to the woman holding the basket, and an old brand found a new voice

Old Spice has sold men’s fragrance since the late 1930s, first under the Shulton company and, from 1990, under Procter & Gamble. By the 2000s the name was widely seen as old-fashioned, tied to an older generation of men. The brand introduced a men’s body wash in 2003, and as the category grew it filled with competitors; by 2006 Old Spice was losing ground and appointed a new agency, Wieden+Kennedy in Portland. When the Associated Press covered the brand in 2010, a consultant it quoted said Old Spice had been at risk of joining older P&G brands such as Noxzema and Comet that the company had sold.

On 4 February 2010, a few days before the Super Bowl, Old Spice put “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” online, and the ad reached television after the game. The actor Isaiah Mustafa, in a single continuous take, moved from a bathroom to a boat to a horse while speaking straight to the women watching: “Hello, ladies.” In June the spot won the Grand Prix for Film at Cannes Lions. In July Wieden+Kennedy produced 186 short personalised video replies to fans and celebrities over about two and a half days. The agency’s case study reports that sales were up 125% year on year by the end of July, and that by the end of 2010 Old Spice was the best-selling men’s body wash brand in the United States.

The person who pays and the person who uses

The agency’s research found that women made more than half of all body wash purchases. That one fact changed the design of the campaign. Most men’s grooming advertising spoke to the man in the shower; the person choosing the bottle at the shop, who according to the agency often bought women’s products for the men at home, was left out of the conversation.

In the method a well-formed promise names its recipient, and changing the recipient means making a different promise. The books suggest a double pass when the decision-maker and the user are two different people, because each has their own motivation and their own reasons to say no. When the person who pays and the person who uses are different, a promise written only for the user leaves the decision to chance. Old Spice wrote for both at once. The woman was addressed directly and invited to want something for her partner; the man watching over her shoulder saw a version of himself he was happy to be compared with. The line “anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady” asked the buyer to change what went into the basket.

Age, read as experience

The other decision concerned the brand’s biggest weakness. Wieden+Kennedy’s account team said later that the big question was whether a brand with that name could be relevant to young men, and that they chose to treat seventy years of heritage as experience: a brand that had been around long enough to be an authority on being a man.

This is a reading of core values that many ageing brands skip. A long history can be carried as a burden to hide, or it can be read for what it says in the customer’s language. The facts were the same either way. What changed was the value the brand drew from them, and the ad expressed it with enough self-mockery that the claim never sounded pompous.

Keeping the voice in the conversation

The Response campaign extended the promise into a channel where people could talk back. Replying to individual comments within hours turned a television character into someone who seemed to be listening, and gave the audience a reason to keep coming back while the attention lasted.

Success of that kind carries a risk the brand has to manage: a character this distinctive becomes the brand, and every later campaign is measured against him. Old Spice has since rotated new faces, and brought Mustafa back for the tenth anniversary in 2020.

The lesson for an older brand is to look twice at who actually makes the purchase, and to read its history for a value the customer can use. If you want to rework who your promise is addressed to before the next campaign brief is written, see what we do.