Spreading the Word (and the Lotion) in Small-Town Alaska

COMPANIES have been trying to create their own social networks ever since Friendster became popular. It was part fad and part marketer’s hope that customers were so devoted that they were dying to discuss shampoo or tires online.

With a campaign beginning this month, Vaseline is testing a more conceptual approach. Rather than creating an online social network, it is aiming to map the social network of a small town in Alaska.

The idea is to show that a new Vaseline lotion, Clinical Therapy, is so effective that the residents of Kodiak, Alaska, passed the word around.

It was partly of their own accord, and partly because Vaseline was pushing it: Vaseline representatives set up shop in a storefront in Kodiak and gave away free bottles. The residents had to pinpoint which of their fellow townspeople had recommended it.

Vaseline representatives began mapping who was suggesting the lotion to whom. It was not curiosity that drove them, but commercialism. They were trying to find a plugged-in Kodiak resident who had widely recommended the lotion, to be featured in commercials.

They found her in Petal Ruch, a voice coach and 40-year-old mother of four. She tried the lotion when she read the company was giving it away.

“I told them about a bunch of other people in our community that I thought could really use a good moisturizer since we all have dry skin and stuff,” Ms. Ruch said.

The campaign would focus on how Ms. Ruch “prescribed” the clinical-strength lotion to her town. (It is clinical strength in terms of the moisture levels, though it does not contain medication.)

“When the Vaseline campaign people told me that I was going to be their main person, I was totally astonished,” Ms. Ruch said.

Vaseline, owned by Unilever, wanted the campaign to have a real-world feel, as if Ms. Ruch had discovered and recommended the lotion on her own.

Working with the ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty and the production company @radical.media, Vaseline approached the project like a documentary. Story producers interviewed Kodiak residents who had tried the lotion, and two crews spent nine days filming in Kodiak.

The central question was “how can you use skin as a way into people’s lives?” said Justin Wilkes, the vice president for media and entertainment at @radical.media.

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The filmmakers shot Ms. Ruch and her family as they went to karate class and ran through the forest. They interviewed her about how Clinical Therapy fit into her life — it softened her husband’s rough hands, for example — and that makes up much of the commercials.

Online, days’ worth of film has been edited into vignettes lasting several minutes. In those vignettes, Clinical Therapy is a background player, and the focus is on the residents of Kodiak and the town itself. There are shots of moody blue-gray skies and sea lions, and stories about residents like Wes Whipple, a blacksmith and knife maker. (Clinical Therapy sits on his shelf among his tools.) “We actually learned so much about their characters, as if we were genuinely making a film about them through their skin,” Mr. Wilkes said.

At prescribethenation.com, the marketing team will replicate the social map showing the links between Ms. Ruch and the various residents she “prescribed.”

“We found the whole concept of the interconnectedness of people really fascinating,” said John Foster, the creative director of Bartle Bogle Hegarty New York.

Alaska was chosen not for its now-famous governor, but for its harsh weather and small towns. “It’s a very small, hometown, close-knit community,” said Srini Sripada, marketing director for skin care and cleansers at Unilever. “So it allowed us to say, ‘Look, if we seed this among a community there, we’ll see how it propagates.’ ”

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Vaseline is introducing another line this fall. It comes in streamlined midnight blue packaging, which means, naturally, that it is aimed at men.

Men are not so wild about lotion, Vaseline found. “They’re the least concerned, I would say, among our consumers for taking care of their skin,” Mr. Sripada said.

While some department store lines have introduced men’s lotions, they are not yet standard in drugstore brands. Nivea carries a men’s lotion, but its sales are tepid — roughly 15,000 bottles sold in the last year in the United States, according to Information Resources, a market research firm in Chicago. (Its Nivea Body hand and body lotion, by contrast, sold 5.7 million bottles.)

In its market research, Vaseline found that men were concerned about feeling greasy and appearing feminine when using lotion. The company decided to position lotion as almost a performance enhancer: “If my skin is strong, then I can perform and do things that I want to do in life,” Mr. Sripada said.

To make lotion even more manly, Vaseline is teaming with ESPN to introduce Vaseline Men. Sports adds an air of masculinity, Mr. Sripada said, “and it focuses on the performance and the endurance.”

The sports network produced television and print commercials featuring Michael Strahan, the former defensive end for the New York Giants, and Chase Utley, the Philadelphia Phillies’ second baseman, using the lotion.

Those will run largely in and on ESPN properties. The strongerskin.com Web site, which went live in late September, shows behind-the-scenes views from the commercial shoots, including the lotion routines of Mr. Utley and Mr. Strahan.

Bartle Bogle Hegarty produced a set of related ads emphasizing skin’s properties like strength and thickness. The print ads compare skin to materials like Gore-Tex and plastic.

Using sports to market to men can be an ineffective panacea, but Vaseline’s approach was effective here, said John January, executive creative director of Sullivan Higdon & Sink, an ad agency that specializes in advertising to men and did not work on the campaign.

“Vaseline’s doing a pretty good job of creating a need here,” Mr. January said. “It’s almost marketed as a tool rather than a primp.”

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