Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World

CHAPTER 6The Three Keys to Building Global Brands with Soul

Sanjay Khosla

The quick-cut video shoots rapid-fire questions at young men: “Is it okay to be skinny?” “Is it okay to not like sports?” “Is it okay for guys to be nervous?” Finally a voice directs the viewer to go ask Google. When the viewer obliges, Google turns up singer-songwriter John Legend, who advises, “Guys are searching for answers, but there’s no one way to ‘be a man.’”

The sentiment and the digital platforms are all of the moment. Though artfully made, the only startling thing about the promotional package is the name behind it: Axe, the men’s grooming brand that made its mark around the world by promising to turn teenage boys into girl magnets via high-testosterone, racy ads. Surely Axe wasn’t going soft with this new campaign?

No, says Axe, the brand hasn’t made a sharp left turn from its sex-obsessed past. Rather, brand managers say, they are simply responding to more enlightened, modern attitudes about masculinity. At heart, Axe (a brand of the Anglo-Dutch giant Unilever) is tapping into the same core emotion: young people everywhere want to be attractive to other young people.

This example illustrates how Axe has turned itself into a world-wide juggernaut by following three converging principles for building a global brand: (1) finding the common threads among people’s needs and emotions by focusing on similarities that cross borders; (2) getting the right balance between global and local, with the ...