Now tough and sensitive
A lady spends 10, 20, 30 years with a man, she’s bound to get tired of him. The bushy haircut she loved to tousle now looks like a John Denver parody. The mustache that was sexy starts to remind her of an undercover cop. The ruggedness that promised protection becomes too forced, too much like Arnold. She wants a man who’s as comfortable in the kitchen as he is in the garage, a guy who’s -- here it comes -- sensitive.
Which is why there’s a new face on Brawny paper towels.
For the past two years, the folks at Georgia-Pacific Corp. have researched, focus-group-tested and debated the first significant change of the lumberjack look-alike in his 29 years.
Old Brawny Man was so out of date that some execs at Georgia-Pacific, which acquired the line in 2000, referred to him as “the ‘70s porn guy.” He became “a man female shoppers wanted to break up with,” said Gino Biondi, director of Georgia-Pacific’s paper towel brands. “They want a guy they can fantasize about.”
Georgia-Pacific wants a guy who can boost slipping sales. Brawny’s share of the $3-billion paper towel business has fallen from 14% to 11% since the ‘80s, a distant second to Procter & Gamble Co.’s Bounty. Georgia-Pacific has invested $500 million in a pair of plants to make Brawny stronger, softer and more absorbent and rolled out the new face with the new towel two months ago.
Packages of Brawny paper towels with the old icon -- blond hair, mustache -- have been disappearing from supermarket shelves since November. In their place are rolls featuring the New Brawny Man: younger, clean-shaven, dark-haired, ethnically ambiguous, wearing red flannel over a white T-shirt (instead of Old Brawny Man’s blue denim), drawn with a far more visible, powerful torso.
Companies massage their icons all the time, but usually in subtle ways so as not to jar the consumer’s identification. (Examples: Mister Clean’s new cropped haircut in 1999 and Betty Crocker’s eight minor makeovers in half a century.) A few years ago an ad agency radically put Mr. Peanut in surfer shorts, only to encounter such resistance that it quickly gave him back his supper-club attire. Sometimes social forces demand change, as in 1968 when Aunt Jemima was allowed to give up her head rag for a headband. (She also apparently went on a diet.)
Georgia-Pacific officials said they were forced into a wholesale makeover because Brawny’s previous owner, Fort James Corp., had done little periodic updating. An artist had been hired to update the packaging in the early ‘80s, using his son’s facial features, but the grooming still screamed “Village People.” There was no easy way to make Old Brawny Man contemporary; it would be akin to “making the Pillsbury Dough Boy thinner,” said Dave Koranda, a marketing instructor at University of Oregon.
How to make an illustrated man project a particular ratio of tough to tender compelled Georgia-Pacific to employ “branding” experts, advertising agency staffers and demographics-loving wonks, the kind of people who will tell you with the crisp efficiency of White House pollsters that two-thirds of women 25-54 imagine New Brawny Man is both stronger and more “well-rounded” than Old Brawny Man.
What women want
Peter Sealy, a former Coca-Cola executive who teaches marketing at UC Berkeley, said Brawny’s campaign reflected how “icons have become more real. What you see is the recognition that they’ve got to be more identifiably contemporary.” The old Brawny logo “might as well have been Travolta going to a disco.”
New Brawny Man suggests a more metrosexual fellow -- say, one part firefighter, one part well-groomed middle school principal. “Women want that masculinity in a big way,” Biondi says, “and then they want that compassionate, sensitive side too.”
To drum up attention, Brawny last year offered to put a real man’s face on its towels for a few months. Four thousand women entered the “Do you know a Brawny man?” contest; the winner was a Westminster, Calif. -- surprise -- firefighter, Mario Cantacessi, then 42, married for two years and the expectant father of a baby girl. (Three of the four other finalists were -- surprise again -- also firefighters.)
In nominating her husband, Raquel Cantacessi called him tough but reliable, a motorcycle rider and weight lifter who also mowed his grandmother’s lawn weekly. Both husband and wife won SUVs. (“I got recognized once in a Vons,” Mario said.) Temporary Brawny Man did not demur when asked if he were sufficiently sensitive. “You know the new America, they want sensitive everywhere,” he said good-naturedly.
Men who can do it all
Brawny has also been airing TV commercials in which ruggedly handsome men are shown in the kitchen or living room, serving breakfast in bed or performing other loving chores, always cleaning up their spills with Brawny. In January a new set of TV ads will debut, along with a print ad campaign showing hunky guys in earnest poses of domestic submission, with captions like: “A woman loves a man who’s spontaneous. (Like when he suddenly decides to wipe the smudges off the hallway mirror.)”
As uplifting as this might sound to women, the helpful hunk traditionally has a very short shelf life.
“In the past where there have been efforts to show a caring man or a Mister Mom, the popular culture has a very low threshold,” said author Susan Faludi, whose 1999 “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man” examined the frustration men feel trying to balance their tough and tender sides. “They’ll have one or two Mister Moms and the media will be filled with stories about how the sensitivity of the politically correct male has gone too far. Then we’ll be treated to a wave of trend stories saying ‘Real men are back.’ So I predict next year you’ll be doing a story on a brawny Brawny Man.”
