One Thousand Scents

Monday, December 22, 2008

Random Thoughts on a Cold Winter Morning

I always have a bunch of samples lying around on my computer desk, because I always need to be wearing whatever I'm writing about so that's where they usually end up, and then they just accrete. (I can see a dozen from where I sit: there are more in the drawer next to me.) I came home from work the other day and there was a post-it note stuck to the cardboard folder containing Fancy, which has a picture of Jessica Simpson looking sultry. Jim said, "I had to cover it with something because every time I looked over at your desk, all I could see was her staring at me with her dead eyes!"

This is what he chose not to see:

She is unsettlingly vapid, isn't she?

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This morning in the shower I used A*Men shower gel, and it occurred to me that the Mugler people wasted a perfect opportunity. A*Men is a fantastic name for a scent: it not only means "Angel for Men", it sounds like "amen", for that religious connotation also present in "Angel".

And what did they call their follow-up? B*Men, which is not only meaningless but also irrevocably throws away another great name.

If only they'd called it D*Men! Then you'd have one scent called Angel (for Men) and one called Demon, and it would have been a perfect pair. But if you've called the second scent B*Men, then you're stuck, because you can't call the third one C*Men, for reasons that I hope are obvious if you say it out loud, and you can't just skip over that one and go straight to D*Men, because then people will say, "Hey, what about C*Men? Oh!....", which is almost as bad.

Way to screw it up, Mugler marketing people.

2 Comments:

  • so very funny - I never thought about the whole A*Men, B*Men thing. And it still gets hairy further down the alphabet....O*Men (a scent for the antichrist in all of us???)

    thanks for the laugh this morning.

    Marko

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12:15 PM  

  • I never even though of O*Men--very good!

    I suppose G*Men and T*Men are already taken by the U.S. government, and X*Men by Marvel Comics. That still leaves a bunch more, if the Mugler marketing folks are interested. Probably better to pursue a whole new line of names, though.

    By Blogger pyramus, at 3:01 AM  

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