- Suave is near the bottom rungs of a tall price ladder in haircare. Even its affordably-priced sibling, faster-growing Tresemme, is priced slightly higher in some cases, and other Unilever offerings such as Dove, Clear, Tigi, Bed Head and Living Proof occupy higher rungs. The last, packaged in understated style not unlike Evaus, sells at $59 for a 24-ounce bottle on Ulta.com, or around 10 times the price of Suave per ounce at Walmart.
Full disclosure- I'm an Aveda whore but I have a hard time spending $130 on six months' worth of shampoo so about half the year or so I'm most decidedly not fancy with my shampoo. And it's not that Suave is bad shampoo? It's that Suave is bad shampoo. Anybody with long hair that's used it is now painfully aware of just how far an Instagram whore will go to pimp product - far enough to sing the praises of Suave in exchange for exposure.
So in conclusion, influencers are bullshitters? What else is new? Massive explosion of little fidget toys lately. I don't know who came up with that, but it's been spreading like a virus... It's a really clever campaign actually - props to carrot for thinking of that! I think most people will hear the intended message that Suave is not such a crappy shampoo after all (until they buy and test it out). It's funny how they say in the interview they don't want to go for the premium market despite the fact this experiment has proven they could sell their shampoo at premium prices. Yeah right - more like you know your shampoo won't make it cause it's shitty.
I think what's new is the fact that "influencers" no longer go through any sort of vetting process and they no longer have any monetization/incentive structure that keeps them impartial. We're talking about reviewers, basically, and once upon a time you needed to have the ear of the King or a column in the broadsheet or a 4-minute segment on the local news or something but that is no longer the case and as such, you no longer have the largesse of the king or a per-word fee from the broadsheet or a dayrate from the local news so swag is effectively 100% of the motivation for doing your job and that's a change that's happened behind the scenes without the audience noticing. Suave's advertising approach has long been "like the salon shit but cheap" so I think this was a natural fit for them but you're right - the reason they've always been the choice of uncaring cheapskates everywhere is you don't have to use much of it to determine it ain't great. I mean, I've got some Tresemme conditioner in my hair right now and it feels as if my hair is made out of depleted uranium the shit is so heavy. Suave? Ferget it.
A little/not really. Influencer campaigns are your Mary Kay/Tupperware-style marketing approaches; yes you have metrics but you have different metrics. You spend this much with this many people and you get this much uptick in social media channels, which usually makes your agency happy, but then the accountants say "yeah but our product didn't fly off the shelves any faster." "Got Milk" is probably one of the most, if not the most influential ad campaign of the past couple-three decades. It's in the public lexicon. It's everywhere. It did fuckall for milk sales. In fact, over the 20 years (!) the campaign ran, milk consumption dropped 20 percent (Michael Bay ad be damned). That said, "Got Milk" has all the traditional metrics you could possibly want. Print buys, radio buys, television buys, put the money in, see what comes out. Compare and contrast: Weiden and Kennedy set up a commercial crew with writers for a couple days and just riffed on Internet shit and the Internet loved it. Metrics? Well, they got pageviews. 165 million. But more importantly: https://www.dandad.org/en/d-ad-old-spice-case-study-insights/ Which doesn't really answer your question? But the rage associated with Youtube is that with a traditional buy, you know the commercial ran in X markets. You know the print was in Y magazines. That shit is audited and you pay for what you got seen. Effective/not effective you can take up with the agency; you spent the money, you got the eyeballs, no matter how distracted they were. If you paid to be on PP 72 across from a piece about Gabrielle Reese you were on PP 72 across from Gabrielle Reese. If you spend on Youtube, Youtube will run that ad when their algorithm says they should, and you don't get to pick, and if they say it was viewed, it was viewed, STFU. So now you're in a position of not even being able to yell at your agency because Youtube fucked you. The "influencer" thing becomes yet another angle of shit because only the monsters do traditional advertising, internet advertising and influencer advertising. "Influencers" are generally fed free shit by niche brands that are going to get their orders filled by "knowing people." I got a friend. He owns a line of Vietnamese restaurants. They're trendy. And he no-shit had a rep fly out from Australia to sell him hand soap. For his bathrooms. For $40 a bottle. And he buys it. Because he's trendy. And when I asked my wife if we needed magic $40 hand soap she looked at me (correctly) like I'm fucking insane. but I was able to google image search "trendy LA hand soap" and lo and fucking behold. There you go. Quarter billion dollars a year in fucking hand soap and you've never heard of it.Sales were already on the rise following the launch of the first “Smell Like a Man, Man” ad. But the Response Campaign grew the brand further, and by the end of July 2010 sales were up 125 percent year on year. By the end of 2010, Old Spice had become the number one selling brand of body wash for men in the United States.
