WHILE unisex personal care products proliferated a generation ago, today the antiperspirant and soap aisles, for example, are dominated by products marketed to just men or women. The shampoo aisle remained a haven for unisex products, but that, too, is shifting, with Old Spice now introducing a hair care line, joining men's brands like Axe, which began selling hair products in 2009, and Dove Men+Care, which did so in 2013.
Janet Allgaier, a vice president for global personal care at Procter & Gamble, which owns Old Spice, said men require reassuring that there is nothing unmanly about expanding their hair routine. Advertising for the new line required 'that tone of voice that gives guys permission to experiment without primping' and 'groom without preening,' said Ms. Allgaier.
A new commercial features a man with luxuriant hair at a business meeting who trades flirtatious glances with a woman sitting opposite him at a large conference table. His hair begins to move, then scrambles down his arm like a hairpiece attached to a gerbil, leaving him completely bald. It proceeds across the conference table where, after the woman writes down her number on a sheet of paper, it brings the number to him and reattaches to his head.
The commercial, which closes with the tagline for the campaign, 'Hair that gets results,' was introduced on Jan. 27 and has been viewed more than 2.1 million times on YouTube.
On Monday, the brand introduced an interactive website, ThatsThePowerOfHair.com, an allusion to 'The Power of Love,' by Huey Lewis and The News. Users entering the site are greeted by an actor ( Tom Parker) sitting on a couch, a woman beside him running her hands through his hair.
'So I've been using Old Spice hair products for a while now, and I've got to say, things are looking up,' he says. 'One, when you've got that smooth, sophisticated look, you tend to get a lot of attention from the ladies; two, respect, when people around the office see me with this hair, they know I mean business.'
The third result, he continues, is, 'When you've got great hair like this, you'd be surprised how many Huey Lewis songs it can play on piano.'
As in the commercial, the actor's hair crawls down his arm and across the room to perch in front of a keyboard, as the text, 'Request a Huey Lewis song,' appears over a large fuchsia box with a flashing cursor.
Type one of 29 songs the brand has licensed, like 'Hip to be Square,' and the hair appears to play a portion of it on the keyboard.
'We have a joke that we tell our team,' said Jason Bagley, a creative director at Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore., the agency of record for Old Spice. 'If it's possible and within budget, we don't want to hear it.'
Along with Wieden & Kennedy's best known commercial for Old Spice, a 2010 ad featuring Isaiah Mustafa somehow going from a bathroom to a boat to riding a horse in a single camera shot, which garnered 47.8 million views on YouTube, another video explaining how it was made has received 1.8 million views.
For new commercials and the website, toupees were fashioned to replicate the actors' actual hair and then made into puppets. In the moment the hair seems to separate from an actor's scalp, the actor is actually wearing a bald cap, and a puppeteer in a green-screen suit makes the hair appear to scurry and, in the case of the website, play the piano.
As for choosing Huey Lewis, whose biggest hits were released in the 1980s before many in the Old Spice target demographic, men aged 18 to 34, were born, another creative director at Wieden & Kennedy, Craig Allen, said the singer still resonated.
'It's kind of a fun throwback where our older guys will get him, and younger guys will get him from movies that his music's in, like 'Pineapple Express' and 'Back to the Future,' ' Mr. Allen said.
David Vinjamuri, the author of 'Accidental Branding' and an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, found something decidedly counterintuitive about the commercials and website. 'It's very odd to see a commercial that is for hair care products and yet the man in it spends half of the commercial being bald,' said Mr. Vinjamuri.
Mr. Vinjamuri lauded another new commercial in which a couple approaches an arcade game and the man's hair scampers off his head to maneuver the game's joystick, with the game's claw - to the delight of the woman - hoisting aloft not a stuffed animal but an actual toddler.
'Instead of getting her the stereotype of the big panda, which is what most men think she wants, commitment is what she really wants,' Mr. Vinjamuri said. 'That was unexpected and very funny.'
Old Spice, which declined to reveal advertising expenditures for the campaign, spent $33.4 million on advertising in the first nine months of 2013, more than the $25.4 million it spent in all of 2012, according to Kantar Media. Revenue for the brand in the United States totaled $634.7 million in the 52 weeks that ended Jan. 26, an increase of 15.7 percent over the previous year, according to IRI, a market data firm.
Along with five styling creams and pastes, the new line is being introduced with seven shampoos, five of them two-in-one shampoo and conditioner combinations, but no stand-alone conditioners. Only 56 percent of men reported using conditioner in the last 12 months, compared with 88 percent of women, according to a 2013 study by Mintel, a market research firm.
'Guys want it pretty simple and gravitate to the two-in-one products,' said Ms. Allgaier, of Procter & Gamble.
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