A scented aerosol for young men.

Axe was launched in France in 1983 by Unilever. Both the English and French Wikipedia articles on the brand give that year and that country, and both say the idea came from inside the company: Axe was inspired by Impulse, Unilever’s body spray for women. French Wikipedia adds that at first the brand sold only one thing, a scented aerosol deodorant, and that it was rolled out across the rest of Europe two years after the French launch and then to other parts of the world in the years that followed.

The name did not travel unchanged. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand the same range is sold as Lynx, because of trademark issues with the name Axe in those markets, according to English Wikipedia; French Wikipedia also lists China among the Lynx territories. English Wikipedia adds that some countries, South Africa among them, sold the brand as EGO until 2002. The result is a single product line, made and marketed by one company, that a shopper in Paris, Sydney or Dublin knows by different names.

From the beginning the brand was organised around scents rather than around a single product. English Wikipedia describes how the variant names changed over time. From 1983 until about 1989 they were simply descriptions of the fragrance, among them Musk, Spice, Amber and Marine. From 1990 until 1996 the scents were given geographic names. The brand also releases limited editions, which English Wikipedia says may stay on sale for a few months or for more than a year.

Owned throughout by Unilever, Axe sits in the same personal-care portfolio as Dove and Degree. Procter & Gamble’s men’s grooming brand is Old Spice.

From one spray to a full grooming range.

The single aerosol grew into a range. French Wikipedia dates the arrival of shower gels to 2002 and the move into hair care to ten years later, when shampoos and styling gels and creams under the “Axe Air” name went on sale in Europe in 2012; the same year, it says, the brand released Axe Anarchy, a deodorant for women. English Wikipedia describes the pattern that holds the range together: most scents have a matching shower gel, and some also come as an antiperspirant or deodorant stick and as an aftershave lotion. It also mentions a shower scrubbing tool, the Axe Detailer, and in 2009 a small eight-centimetre container called the Axe Bullet.

The advertising is what made the brand known. French Wikipedia describes campaigns, mostly on television, built on the attraction the products were supposed to exert on women as a man walked past, and says the brand consistently used humour and tongue-in-cheek exaggeration to make the point. The idea had a name, “the Axe effect,” or in Britain, Ireland and Australia, the Lynx effect. English Wikipedia says that from the 1990s Axe advertisements portrayed various ways the products supposedly helped men attract women.

Individual fragrances got their own campaigns. English Wikipedia cites the 2003 UK advertising for Pulse, in which the scent supposedly gave an awkward young man the confidence to win women over on the dance floor, followed by campaigns for Touch, Unlimited and Clix and, in 2007, for Vice. The British agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty made advertising for the brand, and its work drew criticism from the US group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, according to English Wikipedia.

The brand has also taken its name off the screen. French Wikipedia describes the “Axe Boat,” a vessel that sailed between seaside resorts during the summer to host music parties, as part of the brand’s marketing for about ten years.

Design and documentation.

Soap, body-wash and deodorant brands are bought often, used daily and chosen in seconds, so their identities rely on signals a shopper can read from across an aisle. A bar of soap can carry its brand in its shape, its colour and the lettering pressed into its surface, as well as on the wrapper or carton around it. Liquids and deodorants move the same work onto bottles, tubes and sticks, where a fixed name panel usually sits above a changing band of colour or a picture that marks each variant.

Scent names do much of the sorting. Fragrances are often given evocative names drawn from places, weather, fruit or flowers rather than chemical descriptions, and a single brand may run many of them side by side, each with its own tint. Ranges also split by user, with separate lines for men, women and children.

Many of the names in this group are long-lived and have changed hands between large companies. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A short name, a tall can and a running joke.

Axe’s identity starts with its name. The name is three letters long and the Lynx name only four. The brand began as a single aerosol deodorant, and the can has been its main product from 1983 onward, joined by shower gels in 2002 and hair care in 2012.

Scent drives the colour system. Each fragrance has carried its own name, from the plain descriptions of the 1980s to the geographic names of the early 1990s, and English Wikipedia describes limited-edition variants that stay on sale for a few months or a year. The range changes regularly while the brand name stays fixed.

The advertising carries the rest. The “Axe effect,” as French Wikipedia describes it, is a comic idea: a man walks past, and the product is supposed to draw women’s attention, told with humour and exaggeration. It is also the part of the identity that has drawn criticism. English Wikipedia’s article on Dove notes that critics called Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which began in 2004, hypocritical in the light of Axe’s advertising, since Unilever owns both brands.

The brand’s two names are a lesson of their own. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand the range is sold as Lynx, and the advertising idea travels with it as the Lynx effect.

For a design guide, Axe shows how a mass-market product can be held together by a short name, a family of scents and a long-running advertising idea. Compare it with Old Spice, the Procter & Gamble men’s grooming brand, and Dove, its Unilever stablemate. For this guide we use can black and spark gold with steel blue and a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Axe’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.