Skincare Solutions For Men

By Keith T. Reed • kreed@enquirer.com • June 27, 2008

A man steps into the shower and lathers his upper half with a sudsy gel. He steps out, fully dressed, and enters a meeting of attractive young women. As he locks eyes with a brunette with deep, brown eyes, an unseen voice asserts to men everywhere: “You’ll step out of the shower feeling like you can take on the world.”

Surreal? Sure. But the Procter & Gamble Co. believes the fantasy will help sell its new Gillette 2-in-1 Dry Skin Hydrator + Body Wash.

P&G, one of the world’s most savvy consumer goods marketers, knows “getting the girl” is still a powerful product draw for many men. and It launched the new body wash line in the U.S. and Canada in May as part of its aggressive push to gain market share in the world of men’s skin care.

“It’s really about the opportunities in the male grooming categories,” P&G spokesman Jay Gooch said. “If you think about Gillette and how much of a guy’s grooming routine starts with a shave, there’s a lot of space there; and we’ll continue to look at opportunities to expand Gillette where it makes sense.”

That expansion, which has already brought the launch of Gillette Clinical Strength deodorant and the Fusion razor brand, soon will give birth to a line of Gillette Hair Care products.

Charles Bergh, group president of P&G’s global personal care business, told a group of analysts on Thursday that the company began shipping Gillette shampoo and conditioner last week.

Gooch declined to give further details on the launch, but Bergh made clear that P&G sees a big opportunity there.

“This was part of the promise, I guess, as we acquired Gillette, in how we would take this phenomenal equity that we’ve got and blow it out across multiple categories where P&G has got strengths,” he said while addressing the Wachovia Nantucket Equity Conference.

“We’ve got about 50 million men in North America who shave every day with Gillette. If we can get about 10 percent of those guys … to buy these adjacencies, we’ll hit our trial targets and I think build a very sizeable business.”

With Gillette fully integrated into its operations, P&G is implementing its strategy to make good on the promises of the $57 billion purchase.

After the 2005 acquisition, one analyst predicted that sales of razors and blades – Gillette’s claim to fame – would constitute about 7 percent of the sales of the combined two companies. In a June 19 presentation to analysts, P&G chief operating officer Clayton Daley Jr. said P&G would exceed a projected $1.2 billion in cost savings from the Gillette merger this year.

That’s not counting the additional revenue from new products such as Fusion, which was the fastest P&G brand ever to reach $1 billion in annual sales. Its market share grew by 2 percentage points in the last three- and six-month periods, Daley told the analysts.

Now the challenge is to keep creating successful products for a men’s hygiene market that some observers say isn’t growing as fast as was expected. at the time of the acquisition.

“The men’s market overall has not necessarily shown major growth,” said Karen Grant, global beauty industry analyst at NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., research firm. Sales of mass-market men’s grooming products such as shaving cream, face moisturizer and after-shave totaled $380 million last year, according to NPD Data.

“But it has only grown about 2 percent every year,” Grant said.

A few years ago, many companies began to covet men’s skin care as a market ripe for growth, if only because it hadn’t before been targeted by many companies. The early part of this decade also saw the proliferation of pop culture images – think “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” – that stressed the rise of the “metrosexual,’’ a man who wasn’t ashamed of having a primping routine stereotypically associated with women.

And there were some successes that followed the trend. Body washes, sprays and hair care have had their hits among men, who are mostly interested in grooming to the extent that it pleases or attracts women, Grant said.

“There’s certain areas men don’t skip a beat in grooming,” she said. “Now if someone says to most men, ‘Put this on, you’re going to be sexy,’ they will try it.”
That could bode well for the new Gillette products since they’re all designed for male body and hair care, not the face. It also means entering a category where there’s plenty of competition. Several other brands, including Axe, Adidas, Dial, L’Oreal, Neutrogena and Old Spice, a sister P&G brand, already sell body washes aimed at men.

An advertising challenge

In addition to the competition, P&G will also have to tread carefully with its advertising messages. The company should take care that its advertising doesn’t stick too closely to a formula that emphasizes unrealistic fantasies, said John January, senior vice president and creative director at Sullivan, Higdon & Sink, a Wichita, Kan., advertising firm that specializes in reaching men.

“Overall, I think marketers tend to take a pretty stereotypical look at guys in terms of what they tend to think will work,” he said.

Some men respond to the standard appeals to virility and wealth but most don’t fall into the “bad lad” category, which January said many marketers use to describe “sort of an oversexed Peter Pan with more money than common sense.’’

“There’s a whole universe of guys who don’t necessarily see the world that way,” January said.