You might think twice before telling a friend, and you would bite your lip rather than mention it to your boss, but one soap company has no qualms about telling 3 billion Asians that they need to use a deodorant.

Unilever is preparing to confront the issue head-on with a marketing and advertising push directed at a new Asian generation.

Russell Taylor, global vice-president for Axe, the Unilever-made deodorant marketed as Lynx in Britain, said that no one had yet found a way of making Asians self-conscious about body odour. “Asia is a market we have never really cracked. They don’t think they smell, but people everywhere smell,” he said.

He said that the region was a billion-pound opportunity – “the last empty space on the map”. He estimated that only 7 per cent of Asians used a deodorant, with consumption in India virtually nil, and his team is dreaming up advertisements that will induce shame about sweat stains and odour across the region.

Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch company, is already making headway in Japan, where Rexona, sold as Sure, is adapting to the complexities of teenage interaction, and in Russia, where roll-on sticks are being used on more armpits than ever before.

An advertising campaign directed at Russian women boosted sales from €10 million (£8 million) to more than €160 million in three years. The company focused on the fact that women spent heavily on cosmetics, but not on deodorant. “Attracting a man is fundamental to Russian women so we told them, ‘If you don’t use a deodorant, you won’t look beautiful’,” Mr Taylor said.

Unilever also tapped into the competitive spirit of Russian women in PR campaigns, which pointed out how little deodorant Russians used compared with their neighbours in Eastern Europe. “They took even more offence when they were told they used less than British women.”

Mr Taylor said that deodorants were a relatively recent phenomenon, even in Britain: “Before the Second World War we didn’t use deodorant.” Britain in the Sixties was a remarkably smelly place – a land of sweat, wet wool, occasional bathing and shiny suits – and it took upfront advertising to educate a generation of Britons about body odour. “The sense of paranoia created the market.”

The trick is to tailor that paranoia to local sensitivities. To the company’s relief, risque British humour works well among young Indian men and Unilever is using its Lynx advertisements to good effect, but even so, it has to be careful.

“We tailor some of the media to private channels [such as mobile phones] so young guys are not subjected to watching things in front of their families,” Mr Taylor said.

Japan is an even more difficult prospect and the company has been forced to create commercials for the local market as Japanese teenagers don’t meet in as casual a manner as in the West. Mr Taylor said: “We showed a prearranged date and told a story. If we showed something too brash, people would ask, ‘How is that relevant to me?’”

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