The campaign was designed to launch a new line of men's shaving and lotion products into Target stores nationwide and to motivate women to turn their guys onto a new experience in "prep" vs. grooming. Shaving is the most likely doorway leading to use of other Barber Brigade products. Also, women do a vast majority of the purchasing in the category. First -- we landed on the "Sharpsmen" concept. Sharpsmen are converts who are poised to champion a brand whose time is overdue. We did a fairly extensive casting session of regular guys, just like those we want to use our product. A photo shoot later, we had the groundwork for the campaign. Unfortunately, the regular guys didn't have the right voices for what we needed, so another casting session and some professional voice talent later, we had some sound. The goal was to create a fun way the target audience could spend some time with the site, camped in front of our ambassadors and their messaging.
Basically, we needed to get a website up in time to give people who were searching for the brand a place to find out more. A smart and playful site, almost as cool as the brand itself, was posted a bit ahead of schedule.
The site was based on art/designs provided by Wexley; Seven2 Interactive built out the Barber Brigade site, the sub pages and the Sharpsmen "Send to a friend" email experience in Flash version 7.0. This included incorporating animation, audio/sound implementation/optimization, development for the "Send to a Friend" magnetic poetry and all other facets of site production. The site also has gone through a search engine optimization checklist, which increases the site's chances of being recognized on some of the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Also included in the site HTML/URL are Meta Tags and a FAVICON (favorites icon image).
As an added feature, we introduced the individual characters to a few social networking communities, notably MySpace.com, not so much as a traffic-driving device, but more as a way for people to learn more about the brand. It's a place where people can spend five, ten, twenty minutes with our characters, getting to know them, laugh with them, learn about them.
Since the campaign's launch, sales in Target stores have increased and we've had hundreds of messages sent in just a few days since the site's inception.
-- Cal McAllister, principal, Wexley School for Girls