For me combining the words “Star Trek” and “scent” summons up something rolling off an obese Trekkie (Trekker?) who has only a slight familiarity with soap. (Full disclosure, for some of my life I fulfilled two of these three criteria, today it’s only one.) However the folks at Genki Wear are hoping for a different reaction to the soon-to-be released Star Trek Perfume – A trio of scents from the final frontier.
Those three scents are not named Spock, Kirk and Picard but Tiberius Cologne (“difficult to define and impossible to refuse”), the allegedly sensual Ponn Farr — the name for the Vulcan seven year itch (a perfume designed to “drive him wild”) and — my favorite — Red Shirt.
For those of you who aren’t Trekkies, red shirts were the cannon fodder on every away team. Their only purpose was to die and add a (very) slight bit of pathos to all the bathos. This iteration of marketers are trying to give the scent a bit of 007-ish elan with the tag line “Because tomorrow may never come.” This definitely sounds better than the much more accurate, “Because you really don’t matter.”
(BTW, anyone care to guess how it is that I am related — by marriage — to perhaps THE MOST IMPORTANT UNHERALDED PERSON IN Star Trek history? Hmmm, anyone? Bueller? Twitter me for the answer.)
UPDATE: The great MijFromBuffalo alerts me to this piece of truth in branding from ThinkGeek:
Collateral Damage 