Manscaped makes a point of taking an unconventional approach to marketing. The men’s grooming brand doesn’t shy away from bold creative risks; it leans into them.
For example, last year, Manscaped partnered with OpenFortune, a media platform that distributes branded advertising messages to restaurant patrons tucked inside fortune cookies.
The messages were cheeky, grooming-themed plays on traditional fortune cookie proverbs, such as “A trimmed bush makes the deck look bigger” and “A smooth ride is always more enjoyable.”
“This is the sort of marketing that just makes sense for us,” said Manscaped CMO Marcelo Kertész. “We have a brand voice that goes well with what you might think of as more usual media and when we do things like this, it feels very organic.”
Still, some ideas are a little too risqué even for a brand with a hearty appetite for pushing boundaries. For example, Manscaped’s marketing team recently floated the idea of releasing a balloon over Coachella in the shape of a pair of testicles.
“Even though we didn’t end up doing it, we love that sort of thing,” Kertész said. “Every marketer on our team has part of their budget set aside that’s experimental, meaning that it’s not measured alongside the rest of their budget, and that helps encourage people to be bold and brave with their ideas.”
Chief Marketer spoke with Kertész about risk-taking in brand marketing, striking a balance between brand and performance and what political campaigns taught him about staying agile.
Chief Marketer: You joined Manscaped in 2020 as SVP of Brand, Content and Design and later transitioned to Chief Marketing Officer in 2022. Looking back, what was your vision for the brand when you first started, and has it changed or evolved as the company has grown?
Marcelo Kertész, CMO at Manscaped: I came to Manscaped from deep in the creative world, so my focus at the beginning was very much on branding, product design, packaging – that sort of thing. It was an interesting time to be at Manscaped, because we were growing so fast.
But when I stepped into the CMO role, my main goal was to shift our brand beyond just grooming “down there” and make us known for men’s whole body care, while also moving from a DTC-first mindset to true omnichannel, including retail.
Now, we have more products and we’re in major retailers, including Walmart. We’re finally at that point where we can lead with bigger brand marketing efforts and not just performance advertising.
CM: How do you balance brand and performance?
MK: There was a time when we were spending around 70% of our marketing budget on the lower funnel, and now we’re spending nearly 70% on upper-funnel campaigns.
There’s always a point at which [performance advertising] just stops scaling efficiently. Then it starts to become more expensive to grow, and if you have big growth ambitions for your brand like we do, you have to make a change.
Performance advertising is a great way to break through, but you eventually need to embrace branding in order to keep scaling. It’s a natural and even common path for many DTC brands.
That said, even during what I might call our performance-heavy years, we did do brand marketing. We’ve had celebrity partnerships with Pete Davidson, NFL player Rob Gronkowski, UFC fighter Max Holloway and UFC ring announcer Bruce Buffer, just to name a few.
CM: How do you work with agencies?
MK: We partner with agencies from time to time, but we also have a very strong internal creative team. Most of them come from the agency world, so they’re very experienced and they know both sides of the business.
When we do engage with agencies, it’s usually to develop specific campaigns where we find it’s valuable having an external perspective. We had a very good partnership with Pereira O’Dell for a campaign called “The Boys” about groin grooming and we worked closely with Special US for our “Send Face Pics Instead” campaign, which is focused on facial grooming.
CM: Is Manscaped using generative AI for marketing, and do you have any policies in place?
MK: As a young company, we aren’t afraid to try new tech like generative AI. We use it to brainstorm, make images and videos and even help with analytics and ecommerce. But whatever we do, we also use our common sense.
We’ve developed image-generation tools internally to make sure our products are being properly represented and that there’s good fidelity to the actual products.
We’re cautious, we set boundaries and we stay involved. Nothing is on autopilot. We want to be in the driver’s seat rather than watching from a distance and hoping for the best. We embrace generative AI because we think it’s important for us to know how these things work firsthand.
CM: Before Manscaped, you worked on marketing for a lot of different political campaigns. What did you learn that you were able to bring from that world to the brand marketing world?
MK: I did seven presidential campaigns in five countries, including multiple in Brazil, focusing mostly on the creative and strategy side. Those experiences taught me how to work in very intense, very fast-paced environments with everything in-house and big teams working around the clock.
I became obsessed with strategy and the feedback loop. In a political campaign, if you don’t get 50% market share plus one vote, it’s as good as none. I also learned to do more with less. You just don’t have the same amount of time or budget as you do in the business world.
I’d almost describe it as like athletes who go to high-altitude places to train, because it’s harder and your body gets used to it. You get stronger and you develop more red blood cells. Political campaigns did that to me.
The craziest day in the brand world would be a very mellow day on the political side.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
