whodunnit? — spring 2020, conceptual brand thinking

CLIENT: DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB // focus: CREATIVE

ALL WORK IS 100% CONCEPTUAL AND WAS PRESENTED TO creatives at dollar shave club.

PROMPT

“My girlfriend is stealing my razor!” Who could blame her? The Dollar Shave Club razor is just THAT good.

We were tasked to create a 3-execution campaign targeting these boyfriends, encouraging them to buy the 2-razor starter kit to prevent this “borrowing” from happening again. We were encouraged to pursue themes of this romantic relationship, but to refrain from antagonizing the girlfriend.

INSIGHT

My teammate and I decided to skip the whole “antagonizing the woman” issue by making the product, instead of the relationship, the center of our campaign. We also wanted to be more inclusive by opening it up to other interpersonal relationships (roommates, dads, etc) that a target DSC consumer would encounter daily.

Introducing… the Case of the Missing Razor.

SOCIAL

This social post on DSC’s Instagram sets up the actual mystery story and names the particular “suspects.” This can also live as a paid promotion, or in Instagram stories:

PRINT

We also reformatted the same theme and assets to make some print ads to live in men’s health magazines:

ACTIVATION BOX

We decided upon a puzzle/mystery box that would be sent to a number of men’s health and lifestyle influencers on Instagram and YouTube, such as Jim Chapman. In this collaboration with influencers, they would “solve” the puzzle alongside their girlfriend, to reveal that both of them would get a razor as a special gift at the end.

FEEDBACK

We had been praised as one of the stronger campaigns in the class — particularly because we were able to put the product as the hero of the campaign, rather than taking away from its strength by focusing too much on the relationship between the consumers.

reflection

As a DSC lover myself, being able to work on one of the brands I use almost daily was such an honor! This brief was fun to deliver to, and it was fun to be able to use my strategic thinking alongside my creative skills. I was able to brush up on my self-taught Photoshop skills, including animation and GIFs. I had never designed for print before, so that was also a challenge in itself. I was able to use my prior work experience in influencer marketing to compile a list of appropriate influencers for the campaign, providing rationale rather than just sweeping over it. There was a lot of thought put into the cohesiveness of the campaign, and many tweaks were made so that the tone would be just right.

Lastly, I had to learn how to be flexible and adapt quickly — halfway through this project, we had to move to completely online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We found great success through online teamwork (and a ton of FaceTimes). :)