Dev Patel's Blog

After reading Anoushka Patel’s blog on how sex appeal sells, I thought about the marketing assignments that we had to do over the term. My group focused on Axe products, and I was quite surprised at the level of sex appeal that is used with Axe.

We are all used to the advertisements that play on TV:

This is really not that bad. Campaigns like ‘Boom Chicka Wah Wah’ are to be expected from a company like Axe. However, if you go deeper and have a look at the community website ‘the Axe effect’ you start to see advertisements like this:

At first I was really surprised at the double entendres that filled this advert. I did not expect a company as large as Axe to have such sexual connotations in their advertisments. However, after reading many journal articles about these commercials, it is clear that they actually do sell. Why? It has to do with the target audience. From the second commercial it is clear that their target audience is young men who are interested in their self-image. The reason that most of these men are interested in their own image is primarily to attract whoever they are attracted to! What better way to do it than to create commercials that point out the blatent truth, and get right to the point for the target audience!

Today we discussed Nike’s ‘Write the Future’ campaign during the FIFA World Cup 2010. We discussed whether it was ethical to intensively advertise Nike Football before the World Cup to divert attention away from $184 million sponsors, Adidas.

Building on that topic, a very similar thing happened between Pepsi and Coke. Coke was the official sponsor of the World Cup and just like Nike, Pepsi released a campaign including the biggest names in football to retaliate. The difference between Adidas and Coke was that Coke did a great job in fighting back.

Coke based their entire campaign around the ‘Waving Flag’ song which shot K’naan to superstardom during the World Cup. While it was a beautiful song which encompassed everything that the FIFA World Cup represented, the campaign lacked brand associations with big names in Football. When your target audience includes football fanatics all over the world, representation of the biggest stars needs to be clear:

Even before the World Cup began, Pepsi capitalized on the lack of Coke’s brand association (Pepsi has had long term contracts with the biggest Football superstars for decades). It was only natural for them to launch their own campaign that included relevant brand associations as well as music artist Akon, which sparked much more interest to the target audience!

 Was this ethical? As far as Pepsi is concerned, it was superior marketing. While it was Pepsi’s intention to divert attention away from Coke, or even capitalize on the gap in their campaign, Pepsi was well within their means to do what they did.

I was at home, in Thailand, during the World Cup and I will be honest – Coke was nowhere in sight. Pepsi ruled the build up to the World Cup and even during the World Cup, Pepsi was on everyone’s mind. However, Coke moved past the concept of ethics, and launched a retaliation. They built on K’naan’s success and continued their Waving Flag campaign. A ‘Waving Flag’ song was released in every Football fanatic country, in THAT language. Coke began to target specific markets of Football lovers, making Coke’s campaign a cult hit as opposed to a one hit wonder! 

I think the misconception of ethics in all advertising is well demonstrated here. Sometimes it is a company’s intention to ‘do bad’, but if it is within their means and they are just capitalizing on a mistake from their competitor – I believe it is okay.