Axe Twist – An Entirely Co-Created Product (By FaceGroup)

It’s with great pride that the Face team would like to announce that Axe’s latest deodorant, Twist, is an entirely co-created product! Using our online communities and co-creation process, Axe worked alongside consumers at every step of the marketing journey.

The Twist project began in early 2008, the initial steps of the process involved around 50 members of Headbox taking part in an online community. A smaller crack team of Headboxers from the US, the UK and South America were then selected to take part in a co-creation workshop. The agenda for the workshop, which took place in the Summer of 2008 in a very sunny New York City, was to co-create a new Axe variant that had ‘freshness’ as the key characteristic. The Headbox consumers worked for alongside members of the Axe team, the fragrance house, perfumers, Axe’s creative agencies and Face on various different concepts.

At the end of the 2 days the outcome was Twist – a fragrance that changes throughout the day.

David Cousino, Unilever Consumer Marketing Insight (CMI) director, explains, “The Twist concept was born from the insight provided by our consumers that girls get bored easily and the real challenge is to keep them interested, or ‘hooked’. Using co-creation at such an early stage enabled us to engage with our target audience in a meaningful way, and deliver a new product suited to their needs and wishes.”

“In addition to invaluable consumer insight, this methodology gave us the added benefit of a much more efficient development process. By engaging key functions all at once, we were able to develop within only ten weeks a concept that had collaborative input from the fragrance experts, marketing team and creative agency,” adds Cousino

The Twist concept was then taken back online and fed into Headbox for testing and refinement. The completely collaborative approach meant that Unilever knew it would be well-received by consumers – something borne out by exceptional test scores and good initial response in its first launch market. The product has been launched in the UK and is being rolled out to the US, other European countries and Latin America.

Client View - Why Co-Creation Delivers Better Results from Face Group on Vimeo.