Old Spice Smells Like a Billion Bucks

To help inspire a similar passion for Ever Clear in other consumers, Keith will turn to her partners at the ad firm Wieden + Kennedy, which created the successful campaign playing up Old Spice's "experience." The new strategy, explains Mark Fitzloff, an exec-utive creative director at the agency, is an irreverent spin on the kind of demonstration-based advertising that built many of P&G's 24 billion-dollar brands. Fitzloff will show overly dramatic scenarios that illustrate anti-perspirant residue's potentially disastrous effects -- such as whitewashing a date's shoulder when putting an arm around her. "Procter & Gamble depends on inherent brand superiority," says Peter Sealey, a marketing professor at California's Claremont Graduate University, "particularly products that are demonstrably superior on TV." In the same way that Tide can make a bedsheet appear whiter on TV, P&G will now try to convince young guys that Old Spice deodorant isn't just cool, it's better.

Ever Clear joins High Endurance, Pro Strength, and Red Zone as recent Old Spice brand extensions, and Sealey warns that that could be trouble. "Marketers mistake more for better," he says. "As you extend a product line, at some point, it ceases to stand for anything."

The caveat isn't lost on Keith, but she holds that "Old Spice has broad megabrand legs." And with deodorant, she knows perfectly well what Old Spice stands for, thank you very much. "Friends often ask me, 'You're a woman selling Old Spice to all these young guys -- how do you do it?' " she says. "I know that as a guy, you can have great hair and great clothes, but if you stink, game over." It may be armpit science, but it's not rocket science.