To grow, AXE needs to get young guys to reappraise the brand. But today, many of them associate AXE with an overpowering locker-room smell, not a scent they love.
Enter Emily Zugay, a comedy creator known for her notoriously cringe clip-art-level rebrands, provided a chance to show young people a new side of AXE: one focused on fragrance and humor. In a viral video amassing 5M views, Emily dropped a new, unsolicited rebrand of AXE that “wasn’t made for boys in middle school locker rooms, it was made for men.” It included a new tagline, “The Cologne People,” and a “world-class logo” that featured a literal emoji of an axe on a white background. This was AXE’s opportunity to use internet humor and become young guys’ favorite fragrance again.
Within 24 hours of Emily Zugay’s unsolicited redesign, we reacted in real time. To show we were in on the joke, we commented, swapped our profile photo, and updated our bios to mirror her content. We followed up with a series of teaser posts that fueled speculation about making her design official, generating 1.75M+ additional views before the partnership was even announced. Fans started to fill our comment section with pleas to “Make this real” and “Do it as a special edition.”
Usually, brands mentioned in Zugay’s videos like McDonald’s and Microsoft stop there, treating it like a fleeting social moment with PR mailers or sponsored posts. But AXE listened to our audience, transforming a social meme into a social commerce win.
For the first time in both Walmart’s and Unilever’s history, we turned a viral meme into something you could buy at Walmart.com. Traditionally, these limited editions are years in the making, but we axed conventional timelines to make commerce happen at the speed of culture. Behind the scenes, we fast-tracked first-time logistics, including how to produce the specially wrapped cans, merchandising, and product pages online.
While operations moved at record pace, our social feeds focused on maintaining the hype with consumers. We hired Emily to become our official Big Boss, which until then was an inside joke that only AXE fans knew about. She even got her own LinkedIn to make it official and followed up with content featuring her on “important” business calls. Even down to the Walmart.com product page, our descriptions were specific to Big Boss’s ideas, “cedar, sage and splinters,” and designed in her style instead of our typical AXE branding.
This partnership achieved our objective to drive reappraisal and bring new young guys into the brand. We saw a 316% increase in average daily can sales at Walmart, of which 92% of new AXE purchasers. It also expanded the category, with 82% being new to Walmart’s deodorant aisle altogether.
We achieved over 27M impressions and welcomed 10K new followers. We had audiences begging to buy the collab before it dropped (“please sell these as limited editions”) and fans showcasing their love for our commitment to the bit (“Only AXE can turn an internet joke into a must-have product”). We could tell this collaboration resonated with young guy humor with fans writing “Absurdity is more authentic than perfection” and “AXE did it with an absolute cinema meme.”
