CASE

Study
THE NATURE OF MARKETING
Marketing to the Swarm as well as the Herd

Philips Norelco: Bodygroom Campaign

Creating a digital marketing outbreak

Social networks move very quickly when they share information with each other. But can you get them to talk about
your product?

The key is that digital communities pass along things that interest or entertain them, in person or through the
blogosphere. You probably understand people getting word around quickly about a hot music video or a breaking news
story. But how do you get them talking about an electric shaver?

Men’s grooming products are not traditionally a hot topic in the blogosphere. But when our client Philips Norelco
created a new body trimmer designed for shaving below the neck, we saw an opportunity to get men to look at what
was really important to most of them: attracting women. Moreover, we did it with a very edgy and funny campaign that
created a network of men talking to each other about the ad and the product.

Pitching the benefits of the Philips Bodygroom in a viral video.

Reproduced with permission from Philips Electronics North America Corporation. All rights reserved.

The centerpiece of this campaign was a video advertisement that you would most certainly never see on television. In
it, a man in a bathrobe talks frankly about trimming body hair in a way that is rarely heard in polite company. For
example, he starts out by saying things like, “Grooming your back, chest, (bleep) and (bleep) demands a certain
delicacy,” while kiwi fruits, peaches, and carrots strategically appear on-screen in place of bleeped-out body parts
After introducing the Philips Bodygroom, he wastes no time in getting down to the benefits: “With a well-groomed back,
hair-free chest, and an extra optical inch on my (bleep), let’s just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy.” Soon afterward,
a gushing voice mail from an enthusiastic female friend – with another bleeped-out carrot – makes the point even less
subtly.

The rest of this ad – complete with a mock music video of the same man singing about how “on a scale of 1 to 10, my
naked body was a 4.8” – ultimately directed people to the website shaveeverywhere.com, where people could watch
the video, find out more about the product, and above all let their friends know.

From there, our marketing and PR campaigns took to the streets, both literally and virtually. We shared the product and
the video with radio shock jock Howard Stern, who ran a provocative segment on how to look better to attract women.
We spread the word to influential bloggers, put signs in bars, and ran banner ads on websites like Maxim and Men’s
Health. We even reached one place that guaranteed a male demographic, having talking ads in restroom urinals.

The results were nothing short of amazing. People spread our message throughout the digital universe almost
instantly: Before long we were mentioned on over 2000 blogs and many major broadcast and print media outlets,
ranging from The New York Times to CNBC, and had over a million website visits. And these visitors didn’t just laugh
at our edgy humor; they bought into our message. The Philip Bodygroom soon became the number-one personal care
product on Amazon.com for eight weeks straight, becoming one of the most successful product launches in Amazon
history, and quickly sold out in physical stores as well.

Ultimately, this new product category for Philips Norelco sold three times their projections in the first three months, rose
from nothing to gain a 70 percent share of the electric body-grooming category. Our own industry took notice as well,
with a host of creative awards including the AdAge Digital Campaign of the Year and the Cannes Gold Cyber Lion
award.

What made this campaign successful? First, we bet that an edgy, creative video that offered a clear benefit for men
would get people talking to each other: Nearly 47 percent of the people we studied forwarded a link to the video to at
least one of their friends. We would like to think that they were becoming brand evangelists, but it is good enough to
know that forwarding racy humor to people led them to actually purchase the product.
We also did a very effective job of targeting our community. In the herd marketing era, we could never run a campaign
like this in traditional print and broadcast media for a general audience to see. But by targeting young men in places
they congregate, ranging from bars to blogs to shock-jocks (and the relatively censor-free world of satellite radio), we
could reach this market with laser precision.

By reaching out to the swarm and engaging it, we launched a top-rated product for about the same amount of money
that one US family might spend on a small starter house. Much of what we did leveraged the free and open access of
the blogosphere and viral video, media that were an integral part of the lifestyle of the Bodygroom’s target audience.

These kinds of results show what thinking like a community can do for your own products and services, which gets to
the core of why we are so passionate about this new view of marketing. It gives your brand tremendous leverage that
goes beyond throwing money at people to gain their attention. This, in turn, is how you evolve from attracting
customers to creating sustainable brand communities.

Case Studies prepared by DDB Worldwide Communications Group. For more information, please contact Pat Sloan at: pat.sloan@ddb.com