CK IN2U is the latest attempt by Calvin Klein to recapture the massive youth market that they so perfectly cornered with 1994’s CK One. Even back in 1994, I was not quite the “disaffected, sexually ambivalent grunge youth of the moment” cited as CK One’s fan base in a recent New York Times article, but I thought CK One was great stuff: the packaging was different, the advertising was different, and it smelled different. Mind you, I was not “into” perfume at the time; if CK One was derivative of other fragrances on the market, I was blissfully unaware of it.
Fast forward to 2007. I am older now, and if you want to know just how old I am, perhaps you’ll find a clue in the fact that my first thoughts on seeing the print ad for CK IN2U were that geez, she really ought to pull her pants up, and has he finished his homework yet? The reaction of the target market itself has been less than cordial, in fact, the backlash against the whole project was vocal even before the scents launched, based largely on the advertising copy…
