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Japanese sesame oil brand heats up their PR with love drama starring hot, fragrant, oily boys

Katy Kelly Feb 25, 2020
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Our lovestruck heroine is caught between two gorgeous men whose sweat smells exactly like Kadoya’s sesame oil.

Traditional advertising extolling the quality of your product will only go so far with today’s hyper-critical consumers. Now companies will do anything they can to stand out in the crowd, resorting to such complicated measures as telling people not to buy their product, appealing to people’s heart strings or even trying to draw people in with high-budget anime shorts.

Without high-level budgets, you’ll have to get more creative. And that’s exactly what Kadoya, world-famous goma-yu (sesame oil) retailers did with their campaign to advertise their latest, more intense blend of oil: they turned their product into a romantic comedy called GomaAbu Love (“Sesame Oil Love”).

▼ Overpowering Kaoru to the left, heroine Megumi in the middle, and mild Jun on the right.

Our protagonist is 16-year-old Megumi Gomanome, whose name sounds very like “the bliss of gulping down sesame”. A die-hard fan of the dishes her mother cooks using sesame oil, she now has a near-pathologic devotion to the flavor… and its scent, which is made apparent by how enamored she is by boys who smell like it.

The first of her two suitors is Jun Kadoya, whose name is suspiciously similar to the phrase “Kadoya’s Standard”, has been friends with Megumi since they were both young. Now, though, he’s gotten more popular, and so she, determined to not harm his image, tries to keep her distance. The other is Kaoru Koi, who lives up to the punny “intense fragrance” of his name by being a real bad boy. Kaoru is constantly skipping class and rumored to be dating multiple girls. Both boys’ sweat smells like sesame oil, with Jun’s being closer to the traditional, mild oil, and Kaoru’s being “much more intense”.

You might think it strange to shoehorn your basic and concentrated flavors of oil into a typical love triangle dynamic, but clearly Kadoya had some degree of success: they just released a follow-up story.

▼ Jun offers to teach Megumi how to skate, but then Kaoru appears…

In the new story, the boys compete not only with their natural body odors, but with their feats of athleticism too. Jun’s gentle offer to tutor Megumi is quickly overshadowed by Kaoru’s incredible quadruple lutz spin.

Determined to win Megumi’s heart, Jun offers her a soothing mugful of miso soup flavored with mild sesame oil. Then Kaoru cuts in again, and insists Megumi try some of his corn potage. When Jun makes the redundant comment “But Megumi really likes sesame oil…” Kaoru whips out a bottle of dark sesame oil and pours a dose into the soup.

▼ Kaoru livens up the soup with his intense brand of sesame, and manages an incredible feat of contortionism in the process.

The story ends on a cliffhanger with Kaoru asking Megumi which meal she liked better, while Jun promises to make miso soup for her every day.

How can a girl choose between such spicy suitors? We’ll have to hope that Kadoya lets us see the answer in the next installment, which the final panel promises “will come at an unspecified date”.

Until then, die-hard fans can tide themselves over with recipes on the website hand-picked by Kaoru and Jun themselves, and be comforted by their enticing aromas every time they cook with sesame oil.

Source, images: Kadoya GomaAbu Love
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