Just when you thought the commercial world was safe from the caped complaining crusader he’s back once again with another petty grievance against the captains of industry. This time it’s The Best A Man Can Get Providing That Man Can Figure Out What His Desired Product Has Been Renamed To This Week™.

Dear Gillette

I have been a consumer of your products for at least 15 years and during this time I have never once been disappointed with the quality of your goods.

I’ve been a subscriber to The Best A Man Can Get because, quite frankly, it has been pretty much true – at least with the caveat of The Best A Man Can Get On The High Street Without Having To Look Too Hard. Actually, that’s pretty unkind, your products do the one thing I, as a consumer, demand of them – they get the job done.

Before getting to my primary query I wanted to touch on the Gillette Mach X series of razor, which I subscribe to utterly, however not in the way you’d prefer: I’m using a plain, regular Mach 3 just as I have since it was launched and I upgraded from the Sensor, because (and this is going to be a running theme) it does what it’s supposed to. I’ve tried all the upgrades you’ve released since then, the 5/1 blade Mach 5:1 Fusion XL with dilithium for extra smooth finish, the vibrating 17 blade turbo edition with the special non-slip handle made of genuine reproduction badger skin… I exaggerate, you get the idea.

To cut further embellishments down to size the reason behind my reluctance to switch to your undoubtedly more sophisticated male grooming experience is that it’s just too much razor. I’ve used it and yes, it was a remarkably close shave, so close in fact that I wasn’t completely certain I hadn’t started recreating a scene from the seminal John Woo classic “Face Off” – in short, there’s a close shave, then there’s too close, so I’ll be sticking with my trusty Mach 3 thankyoukindly.

Moving on to my main reason for writing to you today, I have also been a dedicated consumer of your “Cool Wave” range of smell-based products, specifically I have been using the anti-perspirant deoderant for as long as I can remember. Were you to ask an woman familiar with my own natural musky pheremonal secretions she’d doubtless note the hint of Cool Wave in that mix.

My problem is that last year you chaps opted to change your packaging and as part of the reshuffle/reheat/rebrand/remix/rewire/whatever you forgot to relabel the antiperspirant deoderant correctly. At the time this came as something of a shock to me and I spent, no lie, 15 minutes in the supermarket considering 3 different rebranded Cool Wave aerosoles trying to determine which, if any would do the job of both preventing perspiration and deoderising with no success. You move to this X3 scheme was truly baffling.

Over the following 6 months I had eight seperate Gillette Cool Wave aerosoles on my shelf ranging from body spray to the vertical deployment spray to the deoderant, to the antiperspirant deoderant… It was something of a personal tragedy for me.

My question, simply, is why did you do away with your APD, or, if you didn’t what is it referred to as now, and how was I supposed to spot this? Was there an emergency flier distributed somewhere?

I believe there is one simple piece of guidance I’d offer here – men are simple folk. As much as the media have been trying to rework us all as metrosexual, grooming obsessed man candy, it simply isn’t the case and most of us find a product that works for us and sticks with it. This is particularly true of items used in the bathroom – the less time we can spend pondering a purchase in Superdrug the better.

I generalise, but that’s what makes me awesome.

Best regards

Sam

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Searching, Service, taste. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.