Pitching the Gillette Fusion ProGlide at Yankee Stadium
My hat is off to Gillette, P&G, and PR firm Porter Novelli for how they ran their first blog forum in New York’s Yankee Stadium this past Thursday. The best thing they did? They kept it simple.
They were there to help us all become infatuated with the upcoming Gillette Fusion ProGlide. But we didn’t hear about that until we were almost done with the presentations.
I was talking later with one of the Porter Novelli people. After having received feedback from one of the Godfathers of social media, Gary Vaynerchuk, their mission was this:
- Bring in a solid mix of bloggers from across the states
- Get them together for a reasonable period to talk about social media/blogging/trends etc.
- Do a limited portion of the value add of your product, and then
- Provide an activity unrelated that’s fun for guys. The corollary to that is probably, and if while you’re watching a baseball game in a luxury suite with the guys and they still want to talk about your brand, that’s great. But don’t keep pushing your brand.
That’s it. They did what they needed to do.
Enter Derek Jeter
Oh, and did I mention that they brought in Derek Jeter for about a minute to say hi to everyone?
That’s how Thursday afternoon and evening went. Bonus and bigger corollary: Make sure all the arrangements you said were going to be covered are covered. From car service, and hotel reservations, to airline travel.
And to the credit of Gillette, P&G, and Porter Novelli, all of those things happened. On cue, with precision, and because of such, with no complaints.
In the space of the two hours we talked about social marketing, I learned a lot from younger men who are tomorrow’s future daddy bloggers. Most of them don’t realize that yet, or sure as heck aren’t thinking about it, but they are and with respect, I say they’re going to have a lot more things figured out about blogging and social media than most of us dads now who virtually are the true dad pioneers of social media.
The Science of Shaving
But Gillette had a research specialist there to talk to us about their new shaver coming out, the new Gillette Fusion ProGlide. He showed us research videos that showed the geeky side of shaving. We saw what happens to facial hair when it gets cut by a razor. Did you know that for a micro of a second a razor extends the hair out of the follicle? With a one-bladed shaver, that means the hair only gets cut once. But if there are two, three, four, and now five blades to do that same action, each immediately one behind the other, the hair keeps getting extended and the next blade comes a long and cuts it that much shorter, and then extends it a little more for the next blade.
They showed us this process in video form. They also showed us how the new architecture of their blades reinforces the strength of the edges themselves so there is consistency in the shave. They’ve thought about how many strokes a man uses to shave. Did you know 80 men in England go into an R&D facility every day of the year to shave in front of a two-way mirror and are studied constantly as they shave?
There’s a science to how and why a guy holds a razor. On average, he holds it six different ways in the process.
There’s a science about how many strokes a guy takes with his razor during a shave. On average, that’s 150 but can be as few as 25 and as many as 750.
After that presentation, we were done. Everyone packed up quickly, got our tickets to the suite upstairs, and off we went for an evening of fun ballpark food, beverages, and the sights, sounds, and smells of one of the newest, most famous, and fanciest baseball parks built.
Honestly, now that I know more about the process, I want to try the Gillette Fusion ProGlide. Not because of the packaging, which is svelt. Not because it now has five blades instead of four, but because I now understand how I can get a much better shave out of having the product and why.
And that, my friendly other brands, is how you conduct a blog forum. A-plus to Gillette, P&G and Porter Novelli.
K-I-S-S.
And that’s really something we need to keep in mind as we prepare for the Modern Media Man Summit in Atlanta on Sept. 9-11, 2010. You guys are coming, right?
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