As Cracker Barrel recently learned, moving away from what consumers want can turn a brand bland — unless that’s what a brand’s fans are clamoring for. Which is the case for a new rebrand by Axe, the Unilever line of men’s grooming products.
Axe today (Oct. 10) released a can designed in collaboration with Emily Zugay, a graphic designer who has gone viral on TikTok for her deadpan humor and absurdist take on brand logos. In Axe’s case, the new limited-edition offering is a white can with a lone, clip art-style graphic of an axe.
The collaboration began with a TikTok post Zugay made in July in which she revealed the new axe-based logo and said the brand “wasn’t made for boys in middle school locker rooms — it was made for men.” The post notched more than 5 million views, a half million likes and more than 2,000 comments and quickly caught the brand’s attention.
“The reaction from our fans was really loud and clear,” said Dolores Assalini, head of Axe U.S. “They wanted the new logo, and we listened.”
Within 24 hours, Axe mocked up a can with Zugay’s design and soon posted it on social media. As part of the TikTok star’s largest-scale brand partnership to date, Axe appointed the designer as its new Big Boss — a fake position at the heart of a series of posts on the brand’s TikTok and Instagram pages — and made the can available for purchase on Walmart’s website.
“Brands that don’t take themselves too seriously and lean into meme culture really connect with people today,” Zugay said in a statement. “In a world oversaturated with traditional ads, it’s the brands that feel relatable and make us laugh or feel something that stick in our minds.”
Not only is the collaboration an example of social listening, a commonplace tactic in the social media era, but an acknowledgment of how the brand’s consumers — mostly young men — want to interact with brands.
“Young guys today don't want to just be spoken to. They want to feel like they're part of the process of creating brands,” Assalini said. “Gen Z guys and Gen Alpha guys really value online culture and influencer-driven trends, and they want brands to collaborate with them and give them what they want within this space.”
Beyond authenticity
To give its target audience what it wants, Axe has gone beyond the focus on authenticity bandied about by every brand marketer attempting to reflect consumer culture to connect at a deeper level with how its consumers live. Gen Z and Gen Alpha create content at a much higher level than past generations, and they’re not just consumers of media — they want to be a part of it, Assalini said.
“We're not just showing up where they are, speaking their language and using their memes, but we're reflecting the culture that they're creating, and combining that with who we are as a brand,” she explained.
To expand the collaboration, Axe has adopted another popular marketer tactic, using social and influencer content to amplify its broader efforts. Zugay’s content with Axe plays into fan lore about the idea of Axe’s “big boss,” further embedding the effort into consumers’ relationship with the brand.
“It's not just a one-and-done — ‘we're making them, we're selling it.’ We're creating a whole story and entertainment cycle around it,” Assalini said. “It's adding value in terms of creating a story, but it's also encouraging them to engage and continue to be a part of this process. In every post that we do, we're getting engagement for our community.”
This type of social-first marketing is quickly becoming imperative for CPG marketers. Axe’s parent company Unilever made waves this year when CEO Fernando Fernandez said the company would shift half of its ad spend to social and multiply its work with influencers 20 fold. For Unilever brands like Dove and Axe that have long embraced social and influencer marketing, the company-wide shift is welcome news.
“We have always been a brand that has been at the forefront of culture,” Assalini said. “We always pioneer new things, new rules of working, new social trends, and this is a perfect example of us doing something that no brand at Unilever and really, any brand, has done at this level.”
