There is no handbook for viral marketing, but if Arjen Linders, VP of Marketing for Philips Consumer Lifestyle, were writing one, a small budget would be a blessing in disguise and great creative would be a requirement for success.

Linders’ story at LSB’s Brandworks University 2008 illustrated how Philips successfully launched its Norelco Bodygroom in 2006 into a skeptical marketing channel with a tiny budget. Thanks to creative that maximized the “bleep” value of the product’s applications, Philips Norelco sold more than twice as many Bodygrooms as planned in the first year with a national marketing budget of only $375,000.

So successful was the launch that the body groomer unexpectedly became Norelco’s second best-selling grooming SKU, representing 25 percent of dollar sales and selling 150,000 units in the first year. But that might not have been its biggest impact, Linders said. By appealing to a Generation Y target and taking creative risks, the body groomer may have revitalized the aging Norelco brand.

Norelco has been around since the 1940s, explained Linders, and was content with being an also-ran in the electric shave segment. But the brand’s loyal user base was dying out; users were mostly 45-plus and share was stagnant. The body groomer audience had nothing in common with the mainstream Norelco buyer.

Men who are into body grooming are young, urban and sexually active, not the traditional Norelco customer. They consume different media than Norelco was familiar with and use the shaver for purposes the staid Dutch maker of light bulbs and multi-million dollar medical equipment would rather not mention. All of those factors were a prescription for a niche campaign strategy based on viral marketing.

The campaign started with a micro site featuring edgy creative that substituted kiwis and other fruit for the bleeped-out body parts. The site used innuendo to make a sensitive message – optimize your assets – acceptable. The creative assured visitors that “now you can shave everywhere you want without getting hurt” and you can “add an extra optical inch.”

The site attracted more than three million hits in the first year, many of then driven by a raunchy “product demo” on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show. Once users found the site, an amazing 47 percent said they would pass along the creative to friends. The key metric, Linders said, wasn’t the number of visits to ShaveEverywhere.com, but the time spent on the site, which averaged nearly seven minutes in the first year.

Besides the Web, Norelco also used wild postings and postings in men’s restrooms in major cities. “By being very limited we drove the message to the right people; they loved it and shared it,” Linders explained.

Linders left the Brandworks University audience with several lessons from the Bodygroom campaign:

• Don’t rest on leadership; stay hungry for growth.
• Don’t let low budget kill your will to win. A low budget can be blessing.
• Shocking creative isn’t enough; it has to be based on customer insight.
• There’s no handbook for viral marketing; it wasn’t even in the Bodygroom marketing brief.
• Public relations and customer engagement are highly effective tactics in a viral campaign.
• Just making numbers isn’t enough. You must manage your performance or your budget won’t increase the second year.
• Short-term success can drive the future of the brand. Short-term sales and long-term brand building don’t have to be two different fights.

“The Bodygroom helped the Norelco brand enter bathroom with young men who would not have considered buying a Norelco shaver,” Linders explained. “It moved us away from your father’s Norelco.”

“Our goal was not to gain market share but to make sure that we were still there in the future.”

Linders’ successful integrated campaign received the Cannes Gold Lion and Gold and Silver Effies. Prior to joining Norelco team, Linders served as global marketing director for Philips SENSEO coffee pod system and successfully introduced the brand in The Netherlands and five other major geographical regions.