What do you do if your condom company keeps coming up short in testing among the 18-to-24 year old demographic—the ones who are the most frequent users of the product? If you’re LifeStyles, you re-brand with a campaign that uses Web video and in-bar promotions to stir up some buzz and build a hipper, more personal reputation.

Carol Carrozza, marketing vice president for Ansell Healthcare, which owns the LifeStyles brand, says brand positioning studies done by her company indicated that both it and its competitors were falling down in their efforts to reach the target audience of males 18-to-24. Rival condom companies had a greater awareness among a younger crowd, while LifeStyles showed greater brand strength among a slightly more mature group in their late 20s.

“But nobody was hitting the prime target group square on,” Carrozza says. “Males 18 to 24 are becoming most sexually active and are probably at the highest risk of their life. But when you talk to them, they say, ‘I happen to use this brand or that because it’s the one my older brother gave me.’”

One branding problem facing LifeStyles was the fact that lots of safe-sex messaging out there simply stresses using a condom, any condom—thus fostering the impression that all the brands are the same. When you’re number two in your market by a long shot (Trojan has 70% of condom sales, and LifeStyles less than 20%), that equivalence isn’t working in your favor.

Worse yet, associations with the LifeStyles brand weren’t helping either. Asked to personify the major condom brands, those young adult males most often credited the Trojan brand with longevity. LifeStyles, on the other hand, got linked to affluence, as in “LifeStyles of the Rich and Famous”, Robin Leach, et al.—not exactly an image that spells good times ahead to young guys.

“We realized that we have a great opportunity to speak to people in that target group if we talk in a real way about the experiences they’re going through at that age,” Carrozza says.

The campaign that evolved from this brand research is intended to speak to these young adults, and specifically to the males among them, in a way that seems relevant to the lives they’re fashioning for themselves at that age. Creative art features provocative pictures of women built around lifestyle choices—“wet”, “well-rounded”, and “buck wild”, among others—with a tagline,

Lifestyles Creative Art “LifeStyles: What’s Yours?”

“Why are we using sexy pictures of women? Because men don’t want to see pictures of men—it’s as simple as that,” Carrozza laughs.

The tagline plays up the notion of consciously choosing a condom that enhances one’s sex life and health. “By literally asking ‘What’s Yours?’ we want consumers to feel they have an open dialogue with our brand,” Carrozza says.

That theme is carried through to the LifeStyles Web site, www.GetLifeStyles.com, which offers both screensavers based on the provocative art and product information on the five LifeStyles condom lines. “Wrap your PC and your piece,” as the Web site says, taking a breezy approach tailored to the product and the audience.

That “just-us-guys” slant is even more pronounced in the series of online videos LifeStyles has begun rolling out, both on its Web site and on YouTube. Called “Noah and Baron Talk Real Man Sh*t”, the video series will feature two would-be stand-up comics doing man-on-the-street interviews on a swing through different European cities. In each episode, slated to appear every few weeks during February and March, they’ll be talking sex with foreigners.

“Every day, one of the top two news stories in this country is about sex,” says Carrozza. “We’re preoccupied, but at the same time we have a Puritanism about it. So we thought it would be interesting to look further for today’s perspective on sex—and maybe find some funny events in that area along the way.”

The videos will be unscripted interviews with regular people, and will presumably stake out that broad middle ground between high-school health films and the ringing “regular-guy” endorsements for male enhancers seen on late-night TV. “These guys seem to have an affinity for simply talking to people in a funny way but not over the top—the way an Ellen Degeneres might do,” says Carrozza.

The “What’s Yours?” rebranding campaign will be paired with in-bar promotional efforts designed by AMP Agency. The most notable of these will include a LifeStyles-branded “photo/ makeout booth” that will dispense both four-shot black and white picture strips and condoms. The booths were unveiled at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City UT last January and are now going into several night spots in New York City.

LifeStyles makeout booth

How difficult is it to walk that line between attracting the attention of 18-year-old males and attracting the criticism of interest groups?

“To educate, you have to entertain,” Carrozza says. “This group is savvy and tends to hold everything at arm’s length. You have to grab their attention, and we believe the humor/ sex does that. Once you’ve done that, then they’re ready to hear the serious message about protecting themselves.”