Old Spice: Swan Dive or Cannonball?

Old Spice: Swan Dive or Cannonball?
Photo by Oliver Sjöström / Unsplash

By now, you’ll have seen the excellent recent Old Spice ads as well as the ingenious @oldspice followup campaign.

But the thing is, as good as they are, its not going to make me buy old spice. And I don’t think I’m the only one. They’re amusing precisely because they take the piss out of the OTT manliness traditionally associated with the brand.

At them not with them

Well done to Procter & Gamble for embracing a great idea and letting W&K do a good job of it. The brand has certainly received more exposure than it’s seen for a long time. But in terms of building a relationship, I feel a bit like it’s us and W&K sitting together and laughing at a brand that we both know we’d never buy even if it came with free SWAN DIVEs (which, technically, it does.)

There’s a good chance some may be more inclined to make the switch and without a doubt its an achievement that this marketing prompted such decisions.  But social media campaigns alone can’t fix the problems with the Old Spice product, namely the smell.

Style over Substance

I have to put this one down as a success for W&K more than Old Spice.  It’s another good example of an integrated consumer campaign pushing things further and further and being allowed to get away with it.  Personally, because of my role at Wildfire PR, I’m having a good think about how this could work in the B2B world with different values emphasised. Blog post may come soon.

But for me, how Old Spice build upon the newfound brand awareness with product innovation will be more interesting than how many more YouTube videos they pump out.  Perhaps I’ll even buy a bottle or two to encourage them, even if I’ll have to hurl them into the ocean so nobody finds out.

UPDATED 16 JULY: Looks like there may have been some truth in this- apparently sales of the Old Spice product are down by 7%…