Bold but Never Boring From LYNX

LYNX made its name in the 80s and 90s with its notorious creative platform “The LYNX Effect”, suggesting that the fragrance of its deodorant sprays would make teenage boys and young men irresistible to women. Crass? Definitely. But it sold a lot of deodorant, and it gave LYNX a reputation for outrageous ads which it’s still trading on to this day.

In fact, the new campaign for LYNX’s Lower Body Spray and All Over Body spray owes a lot to the LYNX effect and its reputation. It takes the basic idea of those old ads – that one spray of LYNX will make people desperate to smell the freshness – and pushes it to hilarious limits. A basketball player sprays LYNX down his shorts and his opponent can’t wait to get in way too close. A cinemagoer sprays his bum and finds a fellow film-lover following the fragrance.

By this time, easily disgusted viewers are looking away in horror, and that’s even before we see what happens with the foot spray ad. The 10-second ads, from LOLA MullenLowe, are shocking, silly, very funny and perfectly designed for bite-size video on social platforms. They’re also extremely divisive. “Revolting” says one viewer. “Inappropriate” says another. But look at the key associations for the ad and “Funny” comes in second, below the LYNX brand itself. It’s safe to say these ads generate strong feelings in both directions.

And that’s exactly the point. Yes, if you look at this ad purely through the lens of positive emotion it looks like LYNX is making a mistake here – the ad scores only 2-Stars for long-term effect and it’s Disgust score is way over the norm. But it also gets Exceptional ratings for Brand Fluency and for short-term Spike Rating, our predictor of sales impact. This is an ad designed to grab attention, get people to notice or remember a brand and generate a sales boost, and it does exactly that.

The key emotional response in these Test Your Ad results isn’t Happiness, Surprise or even Disgust, the responses at the poles of our sample’s reaction to it. It’s Neutrality – the absence of emotion. The average UK Neutrality score for a commercial is 44% – that’s almost half the audience who simply doesn’t feel anything when they see an ad.

As we explain in our Cost Of Dull report, this is a major problem for brands. When people feel nothing, they do nothing. Neutrality drags down both long-term Star Ratings and short-term Spike Ratings in our model. It’s also a major opportunity cost for brands – it takes millions more to get the same business effects from a dull ad as from an interesting (low neutrality) one.

So avoiding neutrality is a major priority for any brand. And if you’re in a dull category, like personal care, or you own a polarising brand, like LYNX, then going all-out to create a response – even if you leave some people horrified – makes a lot of sense. The Neutrality score for these ads is well below the UK average: love them or hate them, they make an impact.

“The LYNX Effect” is a classic campaign not because people loved the ads – you wouldn’t make a commercial like that today – but because people remember them. They cast a long shadow over the brand. LYNX realise they can’t shake that reputation, and so they’ve leaned into it, making ads that are irreverent, funny, and designed to gross out people who aren’t in the market for their product anyway. It’s a risk not every brand could or should take. But one thing it’s not is dull.