I certainly agree it's a way to divert focus from an established product to a new one, while cleverly advertising both at the same time - "Cool Water Freshen Up? Sounds good. Man... Cool Water, that was nice. Maybe I ought to get another bottle of that stuff. I'll get both."
But... there must be a natural tipping point where there are so many, it just becomes confusing. The fact that there are even yearly editions of "updates" but without discontinuing previous ones (or maybe they just made too many and people couldn't shift them all, i'm not sure) make it even harder. "Did I like "2007" or "2008" etc. I mean without something like Basenotes it must be so difficult to even know where to start.
This whole shebang came about from me getting an increased amount of enjoyment lately from my GIT sample - and i'm not reopening that debate - and me catching a whiff of someone wearing CW on a bus today. After shopping for pizza since that's the sort of rock 'n' roll stuff I do, I went to a local fragrance shop to have a sniff at CW and maybe a couple of the flankers and was overwhelmed. In the end, I gave up and came home.
I like to think of myself as a, y'know, sort of capable and moderately intelligent type, but trying some frags with an increasingly confusing gaggle of names, I felt like i was doing a crossword puzzle with no clues. Admittedly the SA gave me no help, but surely... Maybe i'll just get the original out of sheer laziness.
EDIT - Thanks for the link, SirSlarty!
Sorry for the long post!
