You sit down to watch one of your favorite TV shows one night and you see it, one of those perfume commercials. On the screen you see a beautiful woman walking up a flight of stairs in an elegant dress with diamonds hanging from her ears and neck. Her face is a picture of perfection, with a slight hint of a beautiful smile. Entering on the left of the screen is a man in a black tuxedo he; wraps his arms around her and kisses her passionately on the lips. They both look at the screen and smile. On the bottom of the screen is a small bottle marked with a label of a recognizable perfume company. Now coming back into reality from the mesmerizing commercial, consider what affect this perfume has to most of the typical consumers of this product. A consumer may wear the perfume while at a nightclub in order to attract some attention from members of the opposite sex. However relying on only the fragrance to make them attractive to others may not achieve the desired effect. Even though smell can be a very powerful sense, it does not affect desirability as much as we would like to think. In fact advertisers usually spend millions of dollars in order for these commercials to create ideal images for the perfume or cologne’s effect.

                Most cologne or perfume commercials are misleading because they try to portray an image that their scent, and their scent alone, will create effects that are often unrealistic. Some common ploys cologne and perfume company’s use are: that their product will make one feel good about themselves, make one look gorgeous and make one desirable to members of the opposite sex. Take for example the advertisements for Axe body spray, in which a dummy is sprayed with the scent and is almost immediately jumped on by several women, seemingly out of nowhere. This commercial is controversial and unrealistic simply by the fact that no sane woman would be in any way attracted to a department store mannequin. However, these advertisements prompted many males nationwide to go out and buy Axe body products hoping to get similar results. “Ross Lovern, a 14-year-old spray user in New York City, says he and his friends decided to go to the drugstore and buy Axe after watching a commercial on MTV featuring a woman crawling all over a mannequin that had just been sprayed with the product. The ad, says Ross, made him think, ‘This is the perfect deodorant for me.’ Ross used Axe at co-ed sleep-away camp last summer and now puts it on every day “(Beatty, 2004). Even though or maybe because of, the commercial being an extreme exaggeration it created sales.

                The main object of this approach is that sex sells. There is no question that the use of sexual images motivates people to purchase certain items. Fragrance companies use this fact to their advantage, using attractive women in erotic settings to push fragrances that may perhaps be lagging in sales. Most companies in fact will drop a large sum of money on these commercials to create an alluring image of the perfect scent. For instance, in an article by, Stephanie Thompson (2003) she tells us “that Ralph Lauren spent roughly $15 million into a push for his fragrance blue in an effort to reach mainstream women with an updated version of its now-lagging 25-year old Lauren brand.” Manufacturers will re-introduce lagging product lines after a short time off of the market in newly designed bottles along with a more up to date commercials, making it seem new and improved. In most cases the actual product is unchanged while the only thing that does change is the packaging and advertisements.