• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 2, 2011

It seems perverse to declare a day in which the richest country in the world will reach agreement to avoid defaulting on its obligations as a "slow news day," but there you have it. What's the marketing angle, other than the fact that we'll be averting "devastation" of the consumer economy?

What more can you write about Consumer Reports panning the new Civic than the fact that Honda says it's got it all wrong? I can't really connect Honda's schadenfreude moment to the fact that "the doom and gloom in the automotive industry is lifting," as the Detroit Free Press' Brent Snavely reports from a conference, although it's not entirely clear why this is so other than the fact that labor not only has made workplace concessions but also is making useful suggestions to management.

That leaves us with the manly topic of shampoo.

Pert Plus, for which I have been in mourning for several years, is bouncing back with a shiny new campaign targeted primarily to men 25 to 34, Andrew Adam Newman informs us in the New York Times this morning.

The two spots breaking today feature such scenes as a neighbor who keeps his wife happy by "taking care of the little things." He buys flowers every once in a while; he also keeps his hair clean. His neighbor, meanwhile, replete with a beagle's face, is ensconced in a doghouse across a picket fence.

"So what did you do this time?" the Boy Scout husband asks.

Turns out the Beagle Face didn't quite get the right birthday present.

"She wanted something that would go from zero to 200 in three second -- so I got her a scale." Tagline: "Don't be an animal. Use Pert Plus."

Yah. All I can say is that Helen of Troy, which acquired the brand from Innovative Brands last year, which acquired it from Procter & Gamble in 2006, must be targeting men 25 to 34 who do their own shopping.

Newman writes that the brand is willing to take risks. "We need to stand out," Rick Cutler, director for marketing at Idelle Labs, a division of Helen of Troy, tells him. "It's O.K. to be polarizing, but we can't be quiet."

Why is Pert popular with men? I can only speak from my own experience: What is it, exactly, that conditioners bring to the party? Somewhere in the Seventies, shampoo makers seemed to have muddied up their perfectly pristine products, making it necessary to rinse it out with something else. I mean, Prell didn't need a conditioner now, did it?

Helen of Troy and its agency, Sigma, do indeed understand the underlying appeal to the "post-Axe" man. "We're looking at family guys from their late 20s up, and we don't want to say that if you use Pert you're going to be transformed into some magnificent women magnet," Carl Sorvino, a creative director at Sigma, tells Newman. What these men want, he says, is "In. Out. Done."

Truth be told, I wasn't consciously aware that Pert, which was the top-selling shampoo in the nation in 1990, targeted men despite hard evidence on the airwaves dating back to at least 1989 and circumstantial evidence in my very own bathroom since about the same time: That sickly green bottle -- standing out in a forest of slickly packaged, upscale shampoos, rinses and conditioners -- seemed to attract no poachers other than my son.

That's not to say that the brand ignored the distaff side entirely; just that that distaff side seemed to ignore it, in my experience. (Who knew that Pert Plus-esque is a pejorative adjective, as evidenced by Amy Odell's review of the new hair salon at a Duane Reade drugstore that appeared in New York recently: "I think the blowouts are too expensive given the quality of the hair products -- they left my hair with a Pert Plus-esque coarseness...."

The brand, in keeping with its male persona, doesn't have very much to say about its rich, foamy heritage in the pressroom of its digital home: "Pert shampoo made its debut in 1980. The brand became known as Pert Plus® in 1987 as the original 2-in-1 shampoo plus conditioner formula was introduced to the market. Busy consumers embraced the idea that a one-bottle product can save them time as well as get their hair clean and healthy-looking." It then informs us that Pert recently introduced 3-in-1 lines that "give consumers Threedom from a cluttered shower and streamline their daily shower routines in one fast, easy step."

In recent years, I'd been converted by P&G to Pantene 2-IN-1, the brand that made Pert expendable. But what kind of names are these for a man's brand, anyway? Pert sounds like a high-school cheerleader. Pantene sounds like a cool-weather potted plant. What about Studly Enhanced or something? And if you really want to reach men's hearts, how about coming up with a really useful 3-in-1 product: One that will put the dishes away, take out the garbage and walk the dog? Badda-boom.