Thursday, November 19, 2009

TAG and AXE: Smells Like a Fallacy...



TAG and AXE body spray commercials are famous for containing blatant and hilariously faulty cause-effect fallacies. This fallacy is committed when a person assumes that one event causes another just because the events occur together. The error in this fallacy is that a causal conclusion is drawn without adequate justification. These commercials implicitly, rather than explicitly, state that if you wear TAG or AXE body spray, beautiful women will be strongly attracted to you. In one of the TAG ads, a guy puts TAG on before picking up his date from her parent’s house. To his surprise, the girl’s mom becomes attracted to him after smelling him as she answered the door. One AXE commercial features a woman pushing her elderly mother in a grocery store when she smells AXE wafting in her direction. She abandons her wheelchair ridden mother and cozies up to the store employee stacking cans, dancing suggestively around him. These commercials incorrectly associate wearing AXE or TAG body spray with success in the female department.

LINKS!
Mom Makes a Pass
The "AXE Effect"