Dove Men+Care Signs Karl-Anthony Towns to Sell Men on Slowing Down

Men''s grooming advertising has spent forty years shouting. Dove Men+Care would rather whisper about fragrance.

The Unilever brand launched a campaign on Sunday featuring basketball star Karl-Anthony Towns, built around its Plant-Powered Body Wash collection and a claim about rhythm rather than performance: that grooming is when men get centred before work, after a workout, or on the way out for the night. Towns supplies the credibility line — "the right scent helps me lock in" — which frames scent as preparation, not vanity.

Strategically, it is the same move Dove has run in women''s care for two decades, ported across: sell an emotional benefit and let the formulation carry the rational one. The plant-based positioning does the heavy lifting on ingredients, while the athlete does the work of making self-care legible to a male shopper who still buys three-in-one out of habit.

Distribution tells you the ambition. The collection is available nationwide at Walmart, Amazon and Target — mass shelves, not specialty grooming, meaning the campaign has to convert at eye level and at scale.

The category is crowded with founder-led challengers and celebrity lines. Dove Men+Care''s counter is the least glamorous asset in the aisle and the hardest to build: trust.