Malevolution: Marketing Condoms to Men and Women
How to market a product that people buy furtively, at best? 1) use humor, and 2) reflect your core market’s reality. Trojan’s new ad campaign, "Evolve," is doing that, and doing it well, to inspire sexually active young men and women toward more responsible behavior. Some networks don’t approve (CBS and Fox have rejected the ads), but the executives in those high towers don’t really matter, now do they?
From my latest HuffingtonPost piece:
Developed by Kaplan Thaler Group, Trojan’s "Evolve" campaign
caught my attention, first and foremost, because it is a new way of
selling condoms: using a more masculine-humor that isn’t sleazy or
pseudo-romantic to tell it like it is (people will meet in bars and
sometimes this will result in sex — it’s a fact, Jack). This should
work very well for both men and women in the target demographic
(sexually active young adults between the ages of 18 and 34). While
older people may or may not get the humor or respond to the situation
depicted in the campaign, marketing is all about being extremely
relevant to the product/service’s core consumer. Trojan seems to have
done that extremely well with this effort — in tone, content and
imagery.
