• by Aaron Baar , February 8, 2018

When you're a brand that touts itself as the expert of intimacy (and has put out a campaign highlighting how intimacy can happen outside the bedroom), it's to your advantage to educate consumers a bit … especially around Valentine’s Day. 

Condom maker Skyn, in conjunction with GQ magazine and Conde Nast Traveler, has just released “Places of Intimacy,” a consumer-generated travel guide showcasing the 30 places people have deemed the best to have sex around the world. The guide is an extension of the brand’s “Places of Intimacy” campaign that launched last April, conveying the idea that intimate moments are intrinsically tied to the places in which they’re formed. And that condom advertising can be about more than safety and/or debauchery. 

“When we look at our competitors, it’s pretty clear that we’re in a market which communicates largely on safety, functionality, and pursuit of sex, and lots of it,” Jeyan Heper, CEO of Skyn parent brand LifeStyles, tells Marketing Daily. “We as a brand want to go deeper than that and truly believe that intimacy and great sex are interdependent. People don’t want to choose between safe sex and great sex, nor casual sex and meaningful sex, and we don’t think they should.”

In addition to listing the top spots (which include Rush Creek Lodge at Yosemite, Hotel L’and Vineyards in Portugal, and Le Pigalle in Paris), the guide also features stories from 14 couples who were sent to explore the destinations and report on their features. The reports were molded into stories by GQ Erotic Affairs Editor Rebecca Newman.

“We wanted to reinvent the way that we test our products, [so] why not send real Skyn consumers to the world’s most intimate spots to test our products in the best contexts?” Heper says.

The guide will be available online (and in a downloadable version), and excerpts will be featured in digital editions of GQ in five countries, Heper says.