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Campaign Spotlight

Renuzit Goes After Market Share by the Hunk

A campaign for a new product in a competitive category is being liberally peppered with sex, but the intent is lighthearted rather than lascivious.

The Renuzit brand of air fresheners, sold by a division of the household-products giant Henkel, is being expanded with the addition of a line named Renuzit Fresh Accents. The campaign, scheduled to begin in earnest this week, avoids the approach common for the category of presenting homes transformed into gorgeous showplaces by a spritz or whiff of fragrance.

Rather, the campaign, by an agency in Philadelphia named Red Tettemer & Partners, is centered on other gorgeous images: buff young men who are either shirtless or have opened their shirts to reveal chiseled midsections.

The jest is that Renuzit Fresh Accents is as gorgeous as the models because it is, the print, online and outdoor ads declare, “the first air freshener designed to look as great as it smells.”

The ads carry headlines like “Look at this gorgeous air freshener next to this gorgeous man” and “Now that is gorgeous and the man is not so bad either.”

A section of the Renuzit Web site devoted to Renuzit Fresh Accents can be found at renuzit.com/hellogorgeous. (Coincidentally, ads in a campaign for new Tide Pods, which plays off variations on “pop,” calls the tablets a “Pop of hello gorgeous.”)

And the new Renuzit line is being sold “at a gorgeous price,” the ads proclaim — that is, a value price that starts at $1.99 apiece. (The product is composed of a decorative holder and a gel that is billed as lasting 30 days.)

The campaign for Renuzit Fresh Accents, with a budget estimated at $5 million, is certainly not the first to use sex as a sales tactic. After all, Lillian Russell appeared in ads for Coca-Cola at the turn of the last century.

The campaign is, however, an example of a more recent trend, in which marketers take a tack that may be described as “turnabout is fair play”: After decades of objectifying women to peddle products, Madison Avenue is now doing the same with men.

The trend takes two paths, straightforward and tongue-in-cheek. The serious side was on display during Super Bowl XLVI on Feb. 5, when H&M ran a commercial for a new line of bodywear bearing the David Beckham name that showed Mr. Beckham baring about as much of a body as can be bared in prime time on American broadcast television.

The silly side is typified by the long-running campaign for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, which once featured Fabio, as well as commercials for brands like Old Spice. Another example of a campaign playfully serving up beefcake is a new one from the Clorox Company, for a new type of Liquid-Plumr called Liquid-Plumr Double Impact. Two hunky actors portray plumbers in a commercial filled with double entendres like “a long snake to grab deep clogs.” The actors also appear on the Liquid-Plumr Facebook fan page, at facebook.com/LiquidPlumr, where one poses partly bare-chested, displaying a muscular abdomen and the waistband of his briefs. The actors invite visitors to “give us a call” at 1-855-HOT-PLMR or send “a steamy Plumr-Gram” to Facebook friends.

The commercial for Liquid-Plumr Double Impact has received a mixed reception on social media, as typified by a blogger who describes it as “cheeky” but also believes it “crosses” the line of selling sex. Executives who sell Renuzit and work at Red Tettemer say they do not expect anyone to take the sex in their campaign seriously or to take offense at the ads.

Rather, they say, the hotties in the ads are supposed to represent the attractiveness of the decorative holders.

The goal is to offer the buyers of air fresheners, who are primarily women ages 25 to 54, an “attractive” product that “fits into the home, something she wants right out there on the living room table” rather than hidden on a top shelf, says Eric Schwartz, general manager for laundry and home care at the Henkel North America unit of Henkel in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“If there’s one thing that gets the attention of the magazine reader, the online reader, in the cluttered, mundane world of air care, it’s attractiveness,” he adds. “It’s core to what consumers want to buy and use in the home.”

The campaign serves up “the concept of attractiveness in a new way that would be memorable,” Mr. Schwartz says, “and potentially worth sharing in today’s world of social media.”

The goal is “to make a dollar’s worth of spending” on the campaign “look like $10,” he adds, as consumers “find it humorous enough to pass on to friends and family.”

On Facebook, the campaign is in the spotlight on the Renuzit fan page, at facebook.com/Renuzit, and there is also a separate page under the rubric Gorgeous Man, where visitors are already posting comments both nice (“I’ll take two!”) and naughty (“I’d like one in a size ‘XL,’ please”).

In another social media aspect of the campaign, so-called mom bloggers are being sent samples of the product and the ads and encouraged to write about them.

Mr. Schwartz is confident the ads will not be judged as exploiting sex because “we’re tying the advertising message to what we’re trying to get across about the product,” he says.

Image
A print ad from the Renuzit campaign.

“I think the consumer is pretty savvy to marketing techniques,” Mr. Schwartz says. “They see the link between the attractiveness of the product and the advertising idea.”

Steve O’Connell, partner and executive creative director at Red Tettemer & Partners, echoes his client.

“Our effort was to keep it classy,” says Mr. O’Connell, whose agency also creates campaigns for the Dial for Men product line sold by Henkel North America.

“We don’t think it crosses the line,” he adds. “There’s no sexual innuendo, there are no double entendres.”

As for the tone of the Renuzit Fresh Accents campaign, “we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously,” Mr. O’Connell says.

“We want to have some fun with it,” he adds, so the ads are presented “with a wink,” with an eye toward “some shareability and talk value.”

If the ads were to say, “‘Hey, this is a gorgeous air freshener,’” that would be “boring,” Mr. O’Connell says. “Bring in a gorgeous man.”

“We didn’t set out to objectify men,” he adds, “but you always see gorgeous women” in ads because those responsible for creative tasks at agencies will say, “‘There’s a hot woman, so guys will pay attention.’”

“I’m an equal opportunity objectifier,” Mr. O’Connell says, laughing.

Although the price of the product clearly plays a role in the campaign, the idea was “not to lead with the price, but to lead with the attractiveness,” Mr. O’Connell says, because “the big part of the difference was its esthetics.”

The agency initially sought the models for the campaign in Philadelphia, he adds, but eventually cast the right kind of male pulchritude in New York.

“The fun tidbit we found on set,” Mr. O’Connell says, is that one of the models was “the guy in Beyonce’s ‘Irreplaceable’ video.” (His name is Bobby Roache.)

Renuzit Fresh Accents is a type of air freshener known, according to Mr. Schwartz, as “nonelectric continuous action products,” which cost less than plug-in or battery-operated air care items but more than a venerable, lower-tech Renuzit line, Renuzit Adjustables, which is often priced at 99 cents apiece.

Bringing out the new line is “not just focused on the economic situation,” Mr. Schwartz says, but clearly these days consumers are making choices “between needs and wants.”

The nonelectric air fresheners are “the one bright spot in an otherwise declining category,” he adds.

The other marketers that sell air fresheners include powerhouses like SC Johnson & Son (Glade), Procter & Gamble (Febreze) and Reckitt Benckiser (Air Wick).

Reckitt Benckiser estimates the air freshener market in the United States at $2 billion annually; Henkel North America estimates it at $1.4 billion.

Reckitt Benckiser found success last year with a new product called Air Wick Flip & Fresh, a scented oil that is billed to last up to 45 days and costs around $2.99 for a single package and $4.99 for a twin package.

Red Tettemer created the Renuzit Fresh Accents campaign, which carries the theme “Refresh. Renew. Renuzit,” after being connected to the Renuzit brand executives by the Dial for Men brand executives, Mr. O’Connell says. Red Tettemer was awarded the Dial for Men account last March.

Henkel North America did not have an agency of record for Renuzit until recently, when Pereira & O’Dell in San Francisco was named to create campaigns for home care and laundry care products that, in addition to Renuzit, include Purex and Soft Scrub.

Red Tettemer “has done great work for the company,” Mr. Schwartz says, “and will continue to work for the company.”

Henkel North America has been busily bringing out new products in several categories, among them Dial for Men Speed Foam Body Wash, Purex Complete 3-in-1 laundry sheets, Purex Ultra Packs tablets and a fabric softener, Purex Complete Crystals Softener.

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