At University we had a visit from the creative director and marketing director for Wilkinson sword. Wilkinson Sword are a famous name in the shaving world for both men and women. They have come to the university to ask us marketing students to come up with a brief to performing in marketing groups to draft an idea for men shaving products. I like working in a team so was super pleased when they told us this was a team task.
My tutor put us into groups of four and put me as the director of the team! Straight away I scheduled a meeting for our team to get a strategy plan and to give ourself a name and a ethos behind our Marketing company. I also wanted to know in me team who was good at what, and who would be happy to do what etc...
Stage two of my plan was to go away and research upcoming events, trends, social media hype and festivals regarding mens shaving (sounds weird, but that what I felt was best). One of the girls in my team found an upcoming art exhibition located in Somerset House on the 5th March - 29th March. This was after our deadline but something that really stood out was the hipster/beard look. After another member of me team (who was into photography) taking street style shoots, we found that having a beard was the trend for men. No matter how short, long, stubble or fancy patterns and twirly ends of their facial hair this was a trend. Myself and one of the other girls took a trip into central London and found stores like Ted Baker salon, kiehl's, Murdock, etc that tailored care for the beard. The other two girls in my group researched all the types of beard products you could get from beard shampoo, to a care kit, to beard oil, beard lube and you could actually get christmas decorations like baubles and tinsel for your beard.
Grouping together the following week as a team we decided that we needed to do some market research (as four females taking about beards was a whole another world to us) To do so we thought that taking a trip into London and asking the male groomers of Murdock and Ted bakers salon could help us understand the importance of keeping you beard maintained.
We spoke to many people and groomers about the importance of a 'beard' we found that many of the men said it was the reason they feel more masculine and that its important to have a beard to look good as it is on trend to have a beard. After talking to all these men we decided to go back to the brief and create a moodboard that shows the type of men we are targeting are ideas at. I created a moodboard (on the left) showing all the types or men of ages from 21-55 would be interested in looking after their beards. We chose the ages of 21-55 as a group as this was the ages of the men we was talking to in London and looking at the exhibition which was the heart of our idea the men were in-between these ages. We found that most men when we told them about our project and how we are gaining an insight into men and their beards they saw the funny side to it this was something i noticed alot and thought that we could base our project around the humour of a beard, But just how do we do that?We then created a gentlemen profile to pitch our first initial ideas to Wilkinson Sword or our tutors, so until then, you will just have to wait and see...
Chow!
