With the pandemic, the use of deodorants went down. Guys associated smelling good with going out and socializing so after over a year of lockdown, they weren’t use Axe as much as before. That’s why the brand wanted to find a new way to connect with its consumers (Millennials and Gen Z) and offer them a product benefit for their indoors activities. We found a study made by Liverpool University in 2008 that affirm that smelling good could help guys feel more confident and therefore, improve their performance. Could this statement be proven right for gaming, too? We decided to put this theory to the test and developed our own experiment to see if using Axe could help guys play better.

Axe developed its own experiment to see if smelling great could make guys improve their gaming performance. For that, we partnered with elite gamers around the world – RossBoomsocks from Scotland (833K subscripts on YouTube), Xchocobars from the US (+919K followers on Twitch), LPGJustJohnny from Germany (+152K followers on Twitch) and Roberto Cein from Mexico (1.7M followers on Twitch). We invited them to play several games of League of Legend. First, they played without using any fragrance. Then, they applied Axe. This way we could gather the data from their performance in each skill and cross it with physical information such as heart rate and stress levels to analyse the variations. But the result of the experiment wasn’t what we expected ¬– the difference in the performance when using Axe was just a 0.1% better.

According to a study made by Liverpool University in 2008, smelling good can help guys feel more confident and therefore improved their skills. Axe decided to put this theory to the test in a context where it was never studied – gaming. As our consumers grow more into esports, they don’t want just to play but also to excel. The goal of this campaign was to gather enough data to demonstrate that Axe could play a key role to help its consumers strengthen their confidence and play their A game. For that, we partnered with elite gamers in our key markets ¬– RossBoomsocks from the UK (833K subscripts on YouTube), Xchocobars from the US (+919K followers on Twitch), LPGJustJohnny from Germany (+152K followers on Twitch) and Roberto Cein from Mexico (1.7M followers on Twitch). This helped us take this discussion to the core of the gaming community around the globe.

We invited four elite gamers from around the world to play several games of League of Legends. First, they played without using any fragrance. Then, they applied Axe. We crossed their physical data (heart rate and stress level) with all the information of their game – kills, deaths, and assistances – to analyse how much their performance change when they were using Axe. The result was a slight difference: their performance when using Axe only improved a 0.1%. So, we announced “The 0.1% Effect”. The gamers shared the video case of this experiment with their communities on a watch party on their Twitch channels, and a global debate broke out, leading to an unexpected decision. For the first time in history, the League of Legends World Championship has banned the use of Axe from the competition indefinitely. Proving that even this 0.1% can be the difference between winning and losing.

Our little science project got 168 million impressions and over 1.8 million global views. It also led to 1.6 million interactions and over 200.000 volunteers in 7 countries for our next experiment. The campaign got a 79% of positive sentiment, and this way we demonstrate the gaming community that the better you smell, the better you smell. At least, a 0.1%.