Move over metrosexual, and make room for the “everyday guy.”
Packaged goods companies like Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Dial have identified the next hot demographic in male grooming: Men who are interested in a more clean-cut appearance, but aren't taking the idea to the extreme. Or, as Glenn Williams, a P&G rep, put it: Someone who falls between “metrosexual and Neanderthal.”
Various factors converged to create this new man. The advent of the “metrosexual”—a term first coined by British journalist Mark Simpson in the 1990s—opened the door for marketing previously women-only products like lip balms, conditioners and moisturizers to men, even though the new demo was somewhat overhyped.
“The metrosexual was never as true as we, a manufacturing class, wanted it to be,” said David Rubin, Unilever's U.S. hair care marketing director. “He is there, and he still wants to be [marketed] to...but as a population, he's actually very small.”
What's been there this whole time, however, is a man who equates good grooming—which includes such previously feminine beauty items as body wash—with success and confidence. Being men, though, many want their products to have demonstrable utility—often through multiple uses.
P&G researchers spotted this phenomenon several years ago while studying male grooming habits in the shower. Old Spice, which was branching out into the body wash category at the time, discovered that men used their significant other's shower products, but secretly longed for their own.
“They'd have the body wash in their shower, but they'd take it out or hide it [when their friends came over], or they'd be really secretive when they shop in that aisle because they felt this was something they could use, but it sacrificed their masculinity,” said P&G North American hair rep Brent Miller, who once worked on Old Spice. “They loved the benefit, but felt it wasn't something made for them.”
P&G, earlier this month, introduced Old Spice Ever Clear, an antiperspirant which bills itself as allowing guys' “self-confidence to rise faster than a condominium tower in Dubai” by taking away the streak. (As in, “unsightly residue.”)
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