Throw a dart at New York Comic Con (NYCC) and you’re likely to hit an anime lover, comic enthusiast, cosplayer, gamer, TV superfan—or one person who’s all of the above, walking among a crowd of roughly 250,000 others just like them.
Turns out, that kind of person is exactly who many brand marketers want to build relationships with.
Since 2006, the Javits Center has been home to NYCC, welcoming fans of all kinds to gather and engage with their favorite pop culture stories. Home to everything from celebrity panels to exclusive screenings to artist and merch booths, the event has long been a natural place to bring new and enduring entertainment properties to life. This year, fans could immerse themselves in Peacock’s Camp Crystal Lake experience, which brought the Friday the 13thprequel series Crystal Lake to life, or marvel at a 10-foot-long crocheted Appa toy, part of Paramount Games’s launch of the video game Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, to name just a few options.
As NYCC celebrated 20 years over four days of action, shows old and new still found the convention to be a prime place to introduce and stoke fandom. But alongside the expected entertainment properties were also non-endemic consumer brands like body-care brand Dove Men+Care, which found the fervor of NYCC fandom too strong to resist.
“It is a couple days or a moment of transformation for people that just is really meaningful,” Lindsey Lapin, associate director of marketing for Dove Men+Care at Unilever, told us.
A brand for fans
While NYCC’s earliest era more narrowly focused on entertainment and entertainment-adjacent exhibitors, by 2011, an expanded brand presence had officially moved in. That year, attendance summited 100,000 for the first time, and anticipating the growing audience, brands like Hasbro and Chevrolet expanded or debuted their involvement, setting the stage for even more mainstream brands like Walmart, eBay, and Duolingo to join the fray by 2025.
Dove Men+Care first showed up at NYCC last year, mainly showing up at the event with product samples, Lapin said. With its return this year, the company dedicated efforts to a digital OOH campaign and creator collaborations in addition to a show-floor booth experience, which Lapin said came from identifying the opportunity to storytell in an expanded way and be a bigger part of men’s fandom.
“In recent years, and probably since Covid, it seems like men’s passions, hobbies, fandoms are more diversified than ever before,” Lapin said. “I also think, as a personal care and grooming brand, men are interested in our products, but I don’t know that most men spend much time thinking about them. Where our men who we’re serving and marketing to are spending their time is in fandoms.”
Dove Men+Care’s onsite activation centered on solving a problem for sweaty cosplayers with its strongest deodorant product. At the space, cosplay creators Andrew McLean, Gideon, Con Culture, and Frank were onsite to capture content and share how the company’s antiperspirant can help their cosplay process.
“One of the things that we were hearing from the community was like, you are putting months sometimes into your costume. It is a long day, heavy layering. You’re on the floor a lot, and sweat is really kind of a problem,” Lapin said. “We decided if we’re coming back again and we’re entering this sacred space, that we really wanted to provide extra value to the community.”
Attendees could also receive Dove product samples and watch live 3D-printing services demonstrate the process of creating Max Packs, a custom item designed to help carry personal items in a way that doesn’t detract from elaborate costumes, addressing another complaint common amongst cosplayers, Lapin said. Dove partnered with Galactic Armory, a 3D-printing company popular in the cosplay space, to bring this to life, ultimately giving out 1,000 Max Packs at designated times throughout Comic Con, along with 30,000 miniature deodorant samples, a sample total in line with last year’s event.
Great expectations
In the last two years, Dove Men has ramped up its presence in fandom communities As the brand figures out how to connect its products to fan spaces even further, she said, her team looks for events where “performance and passion intersect.”
Identifying a specific reason to be there is also imperative, because Lapin recognizes that fan events are often “sacred spaces.” Her philosophy is that brand presence should aim to solve pain points, and ideally lend “consistency and longevity” to brand storytelling.
As events like NYCC continue to evolve, Lapin also recognizes that audiences almost certainly have come to expect brand presence, which only raises the bar for brands looking to make a positive impression. Dove Men+Care will be tracking social engagements and earned coverage to get a sense of brand salience, a priority over conversion and sales, she said. Immediately following the weekend, the brand reported 3.1 million total impressions and six earned media placements.
“The best response that we can get from the last two years where we have been exploring fandom spaces is like, ‘Oh yeah, like I can’t believe a deodorant brand wasn’t here before,’” Lapin said. “That tells us that there’s not only a good reason for us to be there, but that we tapped into something.”
