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Axe or Lynx is a brand of male grooming products owned by the British company
Unilever Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy drink, t ...
and marketed toward the younger male demographic. It is marketed as Lynx in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Malta, Australia, New Zealand and China.


Products

Axe was launched in France in 1983 by Unilever. It was inspired by another of Unilever's brands,
Impulse Impulse or Impulsive may refer to: Science * Impulse (physics), in mechanics, the change of momentum of an object; the integral of a force with respect to time * Impulse noise (disambiguation) * Specific impulse, the change in momentum per uni ...
. Unilever introduced many products in the range, but was forced to use the name Lynx in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand due to trademark issues with the Axe name. In addition, some countries (such as South Africa) introduced the brand as EGO. Scents have evolved over time. From 1983 until about 1989, the variant names were descriptions of the fragrances and included ''Musk'', ''Spice'', ''Amber'', ''Oriental'', and ''Marine''. From 1990 until 1996, geographic names for fragrances were used. In 2009, the brand launched an eight-centimetre container called the Axe Bullet. The brand has also extended into other areas. Most scent names usually have a shower gel to accompany them and sometimes an antiperspirant/deodorant stick and an aftershave lotion. The Axe Shampoos come in three different sizes: regular size, travel or sample size, and XL bottles. Axe also ships a shower scrub tool called the Axe Detailer. Axe also launches limited edition variants from time to time that may be on sale for a few months or over a year.


Marketing

From the 1990s, Axe advertisements portrayed various ways the products supposedly helped men attract women. In 2003, the advertising in the UK for the ''Pulse'' fragrance showed how it supposedly gave "geeky" men the confidence to woo women with dance. In 2005, Consumer Expert Dr. Vince Wong, CEO of Insights Interactive, was hired to help explore cross cultural behavioral motivations of their young male adult consumers. This fed into development of the brand globally, resulting in award-winning global communication campaigns. This was followed by ''Touch'', ''Unlimited'', ''Clix'', and in 2007, ''Vice'', which was marketed on a theme of making "nice" women become "naughty". Their Twitter handle is also active in marketing Axe's various products and campaigns. The social media profile also proclaim that their "tweets are banger".


PR controversies

Adverse publicity has been generated by the product's advertisements for encouraging sexual
promiscuity Promiscuity is the practice of engaging in sexual activity frequently with different Sexual partner, partners or being indiscriminate in the choice of sexual partners. The term can carry a moral judgment. A common example of behavior viewed as pro ...
and
sexism Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers primari ...
. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood claimed that Bartle Bogle Hegarty's work on Axe "epitomizes the sexist and degrading marketing that can undermine girls' healthy development." On 12 January 2008 12-year-old Daniel Hurley from
Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands, England. It includes much of the Peak District National Park, the southern end of the Pennine range of hills and part of the National Forest. It borders Greater Manchester to the nor ...
, England, died in a hospital five days after collapsing at his home. The medical coroner ruled that he had suffered from cardiac arrhythmia and died from heart failure as a result of spraying large amounts of Lynx in a confined space. Videos on social networking sites depicted teens setting themselves on fire after spraying themselves with Axe. The trend resulted in multiple injuries. After these incidents occurred, the company created two ads, one against the use of Axe as an
inhalant Inhalants are a broad range of household and industrial chemicals whose volatile vapors or pressurized gases can be concentrated and breathed in via the nose or mouth to produce intoxication, in a manner not intended by the manufacturer. They ...
, and the other warning of its flammability.


Axe Apollo Space Academy (AASA)

Axe initiated a marketing campaign whereby the company would select people in a worldwide contest to become astronauts who would fly sub-orbital space missions aboard the
XCOR Lynx The XCOR Lynx was a proposed suborbital horizontal-takeoff, horizontal-landing (HTHL), rocket-powered spaceplane that was under development by the California-based company XCOR Aerospace to compete in the emerging suborbital spaceflight market ...
spaceplane. On 5 December 2013, Axe announced the 23 space cadets, who had won the extensive training competition held at the
Kennedy Space Center The John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC, originally known as the NASA Launch Operations Center), located on Merritt Island, Florida, is one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) ten field centers. Since December 1968 ...
in Florida. The winners were from 23 countries, some of which did not have space agencies or had not produced any astronauts before. The suborbital rides would take place after the unbuilt XCOR Lynx rocket would have passed flight test objectives.


References


External links


Official Axe websiteOfficial Lynx website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Axe (brand) Perfumes Orkla ASA Unilever brands Products introduced in 1983