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Axe (Lynx)

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Axe, or Lynx (see below), is a brand of male grooming products, owned by Anglo-Dutch company Unilever who manufacture a range of products in the health & beauty, household cleaning, food and ice cream categories. Axe's lead product is a deodorant body spray. The brand also includes deodorant sticks, anti-perspirants, aftershaves and shower gels. In most of the world the brand is named Axe; in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Kingdom it is named Lynx.

1 History
2 Variants
3 Marketing and tie-ins
4 External links
- 4.1 Official country web sites
- 4.2 Other Axe/Lynx marketing sites
5 References

History

Axe was launched in France in 1983 by Fabergé, which was part of the Unilever group of companies. It was created as a version of one of Unilever's other brands, Impulse, but targeted at males. Impulse was a fragranced deodorant body spray for women that promised wearers male attention . Unilever were keen to capitalise on Axe's French success and rolled it out in the rest of Europe from 1985 onwards, later introducing the other products in the range. The European launch of the deodorant was followed by success in Latin America and moderate impact in Asia and Africa. In the new millennium the brand has launched with great success in the USA and Canada.^[1] The company has also consolidated its deodorant portfolio by migrating other over-lapping male deodorants into the Axe brand such as South Africa's Ego brand and Asian variants from the Denim range .

Variants

From its launch, the yearly fragrance variant of Axe has played a key part in the success of the brand, by offering something new each year. The type of fragrance variants have evolved over time. From 1983 until about 1989, the variant names were descriptions of the odor of the fragrance inside and included Musk, Spice, Amber, Marine and Oriental. From 1990 until 1996 geographic names were used such as Africa, Alaska, Java and Inca. From 1996 to 2002 Axe took inspiration from Calvin Klein fragrances (also owned by Unilever at that time), using the same perfumer, Anne Gottlieb, to develop the fragrances to launch variants such as Dimension, Apollo, Voodoo, Gravity and Phoenix. In 2003 Axe Europe launched a yearly fragrance variant called Pulse using dancing as a theme in its advertisements. This was followed in 2006 by Clix (or Click overseas) which used advertisements showing men competing in the number of women they could attract. In 2007 the variant Vice was marketed on a theme of making "nice" women become "naughty". Late in 2007 a chocolate scented body spray, Dark Temptation, was released.^[2]

Marketing and tie-ins

The Lynx "Billions" advert portrays a large number of bikini clad women running through forests and swimming through oceans to reach a man. The Axe/Lynx brand has also used a number of sexually explicit advertisements:

In early 2006, Axe began marketing a body wash via a fictitious cult that helps men cleanse their bodies and conscience from questionable casual sexual encounters. Axe Snake Peel is described as the "Sanctioned shower scrub of The Order of The Serpentine."
Advertisement titled "Listening 101", featured a woman talking to a man, while he is being distracted. The distractions are a car, then a football game, followed by two lesbians making out.
The current advertising tagline for Lynx in the UK is "Bow Chicka Wah Wow"

Axe released Gamekillers the game to promote their TV show, The Gamekillers. Similar to a retro sci-fi shooter, players fly around the screen blowing up Gamekillers. Users can select which Axe product they use to defeat the Gamekillers. Axe released an online game for PC called Mojo Master to promote their products. The game has the player trying to seduce digital women using Axe products to help them out. An online component was also added to the game to enable further features to be unlocked and allow players to compete against each other. Axe has advertised itself in several other video games, including:

Cooperating with MTV, an hour-long program called The Gamekillers was produced in 2006, profiling various stereotypical characters with annoying habits that tend to break up dates. Several advertisements featuring the same actors were run simultaneously. A further season of the show was produced for 2007. Axe also created an online video game called The Gamekillers Game. A global branded entertainment show, City Hunters, co-produced by Unilever for the Axe brand, premiered throughout Latin America in 2006 on the Fox network. The series consists of ten eleven-minute episodes blending traditional animation techniques with the latest generation of computer-generated imagery. It is a male-targeted series that integrates the Axe brand into the storyline, following the antics of an aging Casanova and a young man he is training in the art of seducing women. In 2007, Axe began sponsoring an all-female group called the Bom Chicka Wah Wahs and released a music video of their song Bom Chicka Wah Wah: It's the Libido's Mantra. Axe is sponsoring a world tour of the group which is heavily modeled after the Pussycat Dolls. Packaging and graphics for the both the Lynx and Axe brands were completely redesigned in the early part of 2007.