AXE Body spray, female attractant? or repellent?

    

Cologne will speak for itself. If the scent smells good on the customer, he'll buy it. It's getting a potential customer to try the cologne in the first place that can be daunting. Each brand has to build its own personality and story. With so many types of cologne available, the actual scent of cologne is only one aspect when it comes to implementing advertising strategies that help boost sales. Today’s cologne marketing rarely focuses on an unusual scent or using interesting ingredients; instead, it relies on advertising of sexual appeal and career-boosting power to sell the fragrance as an accessory. Celebrity endorsements can also drive sales up by more than 20 percent, according to Harvard Business School in 2009. 

    

 Axe body spray specifically uses sexual attraction throughout the majority of their commercials to gain sales from men. This ultimately raises many controversies dealing with AXE regarding how they show woman’s reactions to the scent of AXE. AXE seems to project that its scent can be smelled from miles away by any woman. This scent is so sexually attracting that any woman who smells it will uncontrollably hunt the scent down to its origin. So let’s address red flag number one, this scene makes women look like animals and ultimately only in search for sex. Red flag number 2, AXE only used women in bikinis with attractive features along an athletic body type. This commercial along with many others clearly objectify woman for man’s pleasure.

AXE doesn’t only raise debates with women but also with regular house hold families. While Axe’s brand development manager Mike Dwyer says that Axe’s target market is young men 18-24, I suspect that just as with Victoria’s Secret’s PINK line, they know that it’s really being used by a much younger demographic AXE claims to attract the sales of men but sales demographics show that most of AXE’s sales are from middle school children from the ages of 13- 17. My next red flag, Is AXE aware that they are advertising sexual attraction and man hood to minors? More than likely... So why don’t they step up their game?? My guess is that AXE cologne is so cheap to buy it is probably really cheap to make. Good cologne will be expensive, but it will actually smell good. My last red flag is that sex takes maturity. 8 middle schoolchildren were hospitalized after inhaling to much AXE after some kids decided to use almost a whole can on each other while playing around. At the end of the commercial it states “use more , get more”. I disagree. I’m not sure why 11-year-old boys need a product that has a “smooth, sexy scent I think kids are already figuring out after adolescences that applying gallons of the stuff doesn't, in fact, make you “the rugged and mysterious guy she’d do almost anything to touch,” as the ads would have you believe. even when i was in middle school I had better taste in cologne...