Manscaped CMO on authenticity, Pete Davidson and cultural variants of the word ‘balls’

Founded in 2016, the brand has become known for its edgy marketing campaigns, which typically revolve around moderately risqué humor. Unlike so many other brands with products designed for the tender loving care of the human genitalia (mainstream tampon companies come to mind, for example), Manscaped has sought to make itself by using arrestingly blunt language. One of its slogans is: “Your balls will thank you.”

This has been a delicate line to tow: for years, the brand has been refining its methods of marketing itself in a tone that is balanced somewhere between politely reserved and sexually explicit. As it turns out, talking about testicles without actually mentioning the word “testicles” is something of an art form in and of itself.

Earlier this year, for example, Manscaped launched an out-of-home (OOH) campaign in two New York City railway stations that showed confident- and happy-looking men, along with the slogan “Big Groomed Energy,” or “BGE”; the phrase and the acronym are a refashioning of “BDE,” another acronym with a meaning you can probably guess. And earlier this week the brand released a holiday ad starring Pete Davidson – a Manscaped brand partner since July – in which the comedian was horrified to find a long trail of Santa’s pubes on Christmas morning.

Such bawdy ads push the limits of acceptability, even here in the United States. But Manscaped has grown an international footprint; its marketing efforts extend to much less liberal countries, including Saudi Arabia. How does the brand manage to maintain a consistent voice while simultaneously refraining from pushing the boundaries too far?

The Drum recently spoke with Manscaped chief marketing officer Marcelo Kertész to learn more about how the brand has managed to find a healthy balance in its marketing efforts...

Men’s grooming has traditionally been a fairly stigmatized subject in the marketing world. How has Manscaped managed to break through that stigma?

We have been able to engage in pretty honest conversations from the very beginning; we really became a conversational brand with our consumers. I like to say that the superpower of Manscaped as a brand is being able to facilitate hard conversations. And both in my personal experience, but also professionally speaking, the most effective tool to do that that I know of is humor.

The decision to use humor to facilitate those hard conversations is a major component of who we are as a brand. When you use humor, especially at such an authentic level that we use, where you don’t try to be too polished or too worried about what to say, you need to make sure that the touchpoints on your consumer journey to a purchase ... [are] tight – they need to deliver.

That’s why we pay a lot of attention to keeping our humor authentic and light, not full of that corporate malarkey. We pay that same attention to making sure that our website experience is highly designed and [that it] delights the consumer. [Same with] our packaging and our product design. That combination is where the power is. Because if you do one without the other, then it’s not Manscaped. It’s not as special.

Speaking of humor, can you talk a bit about why the brand decided to partner with Pete Davidson?

This partnership fits on so many levels. First of all, comedy can be a facilitator of hard topics, making it easier to talk about things that people have a hard time talking about. Pete Davidson is a perfect example of that.

The other thing is that just thirty years ago ... to be a man was a very flat and narrow space: men don’t cry, men are tough, men like sports. Today the new masculinity ... is much more complex, and much richer. Part of that is realizing that men have vulnerabilities, that men have different feelings, they have different ways of doing things. Men are not that flat stereotype that was considered [to be the case] for such a long time.

Pete Davidson embodies that a lot. He has that attractive quality that a lot of people have a hard time describing, like, what is about him that makes him so attractive and interesting? He is not your obvious, Greek classic beauty type. He is very unique. That is very important for the discussion nowadays: beauty and attraction can come from many places.

Has Manscaped had to adjust its language and its tone when marketing across different regions and cultures?

The first question is: how much can you openly talk about it without being rude? Here in the US, part of what we do is try to destigmatize even part of the language, because we do think that it should be a bit more natural to talk about balls, for example. And still, in many of my meetings with external partners, I can tell that when I say ‘balls,’ there’s this internal giggle going on, like, ‘I can’t believe that I’m in a meeting where are we talking about balls.’

At the same time, there are channels and places where we want to market and talk to people who are not ready for that, and we need to respect that too. So we need to find our metaphor ... We try to be respectful. We try to push the boundaries with good taste, with humor in the right place and at the right time. We are in forty countries right now – what we can see in Germany is very different than what we can say in Saudi Arabia, and we understand that.

But a funny part of it, too, is that at some point we decided to develop a glossary of terms that are the equivalent of ‘balls’ for each country. Because as a brand, we don’t want to be too stiff – we don’t want to be “testicles” – but also we don’t want to be too rude. That’s not our intention. So the metaphor changes from country to country. And if you don’t have the local people to really hone in on the nuances, you might be thinking that you’re saying something cool, but you might be too scientific and technical – or too rude.

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