Madison Avenueville- And we always thought that the guy on the Brawny packaging was a paper towel lifer- a mustachioed lumberjacked icon who epitomized blue denim values. Apparently not.
For the past two years, the folks at Georgia-Pacific Corp. have researched and focus-group-tested today’s women and came up with a startling conclusion. Really rugged he-men from the North Woods apparently don’t cut it any more. In fact some execs at Georgia-Pacific referred to the old Brawny image 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.” According to Georgia-Pacific they want a guy who can boost slipping sales. Brawny’s share of the $3 billion paper towel business has fallen from 14 percent to 11 percent 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.
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.
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. firefighter, Mario Cantacessi, then 42, married for two years and the expectant father of a baby girl. (Three of the four other finalists were firefighters.