I was looking for a new deodorant and came across the new Old Spice ‘Fresh Collection’ series. To my surprise, they had a deodorant inspired by Cyprus, my homeland. So, I decided to smell like home and bought the Old Spice “Cyprus” deodorant. A closer look on the packaging though and my hopes of taking an olfactory tour of my home country evaporated…

The packaging claims that the deodorant smells like limes, yet Cyprus does not produce limes, only lemons and oranges. It also claims that there is the scent of ocean breeze, which is technically false since Cyprus is not near the ocean at all, but the Mediterranean Sea, and most people will tell you that the smell of the ocean is very different than the smell of the sea. The faux cherry on top of the cake was the claim of the scent of “freedom”! My tiny homeland has been invaded and occupied enough through the centuries to have forgotten what freedom tastes -and smells- like. One third of the country is currently still occupied by Turkey and there are very small hopes of “freedom” anytime soon.

It seems like the product development and marketing departments at Old Spice decided to forego any research and just go with whatever mumbo-jumbo marketing speak sounded good to them. Or worse, they probably paid an agency lots of money to come up with something so ridiculously removed from reality just because it sounds good enough to sell. This would have been such a simple thing to fix, or even fake, just by spending a few minutes reading about each island inspiration. The scent of the Cyprus deodorant, for example, could have been inspired by lemon trees, sunshine and the cool Mediterranean breeze. 

Another sad example of a mainstream brand’s bad planning and marketing based on made-up inspiration…