Man Succumbs To Omnipresent Marketing

CHICAGO (AP) -- After delaying the inevitable purchase as long as possible, a Chicago man has finally caved in the face of a massive media blitz for Axe Body Spray.

Luke Penca, 30, recently broke down in the deodorant aisle of his local grocery store when he was confronted with three shelves of Axe products, thus, saturating the competitive landscape.

"For the last decade, I was a steadfast Lever 2000 guy," said Penca, "but I just couldn't ignore [the advertisements] any longer because they're everywhere. And I'm still not even sure what the hell 'body spray' is really."

But Kevin Roberts knows all about body spray. As the worldwide CEO for Saatchi & Saatchi, a New York marketing firm, Roberts played an instrumental role in the definition of the new deodorant category for his client Unilever, the Rotterdam-based consumer goods conglomerate.

"The Axe product line annually contributes more than $250 million to Unilever's bottom line, and this is less than four years after we invented the market category," said a boastful Roberts. "Frankly, these male 'twenty-somethings' are so suggestible it's ridiculous. All we had to do was create the belief that unrealistically beautiful women would gravitate to an average guy wearing the product."

While using the "sex sells" approach to marketing is nothing new, critics of Saatchi's envelop-pushing tactics question their approach.

"These guys, Unilever's target audience, never had a chance," said Michael K., a consumer behavior professor at the University of Northern Iowa. "They're hard-wired to be receptive to this persuasion on an animal level so they're not even making a conscious decision for the product."

Results inconclusive

Penca's purchase of the product almost two weeks ago has not led to the kind of results he expected based on the commercials.

"I have yet to be ravaged by a sexually-voracious supermodel," said a frustrated Penca. "Maybe I'm applying it wrong."

# # #


Technorati: Satire, Humor, Funny, Chicago, Snarky, Lukateake