Axelab
- Brand
- Axe
- Year
- 2006
- Objective
- Product Launch
- Industry
- Fashion & Beauty
- Mechanic
- Simulation & Strategy
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- The Barbarian Group
- With
- BBH New York
Objective
Axe was America's best-selling men's deodorant but had no credibility in expensive fragrance. Unilever needed a brand-new scent, name and package built from zero that could carry Axe into the fine-fragrance tier — courting an older, more sophisticated buyer without losing Axe's sexual charge — and land it on mass-retail shelves like Walmart in time for launch.
Solution
At axelab.net, visitors were cast as researchers running one of two experiments on a female "test subject" — Dirty Mind Control or The Stimulation Chamber. The player controlled a dial that dosed her with the new fragrance and watched her reaction change on screen: too little and she barely responded, too much sent her into an exaggerated, comic overdose. The task was to find the exact dose that produced the "correct" clinical reaction, with the site logging each trial like lab data. A session ended once the player hit that balance — or pushed it too far and got the punchline instead.
Results
Within the first two weeks of launch, Axelab became the number-one-selling fragrance at Walmart, a rank it reached within months of leaving the sketch phase.
- 1
The campaign begins off-site: print ads and outdoor placements show ambiguous Rorschach-style ink blots that quietly prime the viewer before pointing them to the website.
- 2
Players land on axelab.net, a full-Flash site pitched as a new eau de toilette from the leaders in "pharmasexual research," inviting male visitors to run experiments demonstrating the fragrance's effect on a woman's body.
- 3
The lab offers a choice of research application: two experiments, "Dirty Mind Control" and "The Stimulation Chamber."
- 4
Inside each experiment, the player faces a female test subject and a dosage dial for the Axelab scent, adjusting the dose to trigger a visible reaction.
- 5
Too little fragrance produces almost no reaction, signaling the player to raise the dose; too much triggers an exaggerated overreaction — drooling, thighs rubbing and smoking — played as comic failure.
- 6
The goal is to land the dose exactly between the two extremes, proving the effect; the same dial-and-react loop repeats in the second experiment, testing a different kind of reaction — psychological/neurological versus physical.
- 7
The campaign extends offline through pop-up labs in major cities, including a futuristic Fifth Avenue installation staffed by "pharmasexual" lab assistants, with top participants invited to a flagship lab at the Playboy mansion.
