With the possible exception of zookeepers trying to breed pandas in captivity, surely no one mentions 'mating' more than marketers at Axe, the men's grooming brand whose racy advertisements promise young men that women will find them irresistible if they use their products. 'Axe is all about being a guy's wingman and helping him as he navigates the mating game,' said Mike Dwyer, a marketing director at Unilever. Now, to promote a new fragrance, Axe Music, which will be available in a body spray, shower gel and shampoo, the brand is staging four mystery concerts in major cities, with the artists and sites announced only shortly beforehand. The first show, featuring the rapper T.I. and unannounced guests who included Mary J. Blige, took place on Monday at Capitale in Manhattan. The brand trickled out the information in the days leading up to the show on its website, TheAxeEffect.com, as well as on its Facebook page and through Twitter messages, where followers entered drawings to attend and were encouraged to bring a date. T.I., who has about 4.2 million fans on Facebook, also announced details of the concert shortly before the show on Facebook and on his website, Trapmuzik.com. 'Something like 85 of the top 100 songs downloaded from iTunes are about relationships or the opposite sex, and the heart of Axe is about bringing guys and girls together, so the play here is how can we get into lifestyle or popular culture in a way that it connects and is highly relevant with our target?' Dwyer said. The target demographic for the brand is men ages 18 to 24. 'We hope they bring a girl, because this will be a place for the mating game to happen,' said Heather Mitchell, a Unilever spokeswoman. 'The idea is that we want to inherently be part of a place where the mating game happens because we want to be a lifestyle brand.' A television commercial, by the New York office of Razorfish, part of the Publicis Groupe, will have its premiere on Monday and will promote Axe Music products and the mystery concerts. It shows a man in his 20s attending a T.I. concert -- with three attractive women. The scent, described in promotional materials as having 'youthful, fruity and aromatic notes with sexy leather undertones and edgy wood accords,' will carry a suggested retail price of $4.99 for both the deodorant body spray (4 ounces) and shampoo (12 ounces), and $3.99 for the shower gel (12 ounces). It is not the brand's first appeal to after-hours revelers. This is the second consecutive summer that it has christened a club in Southampton previously known as Dune as the Axe Lounge, a sponsorship akin to naming-rights deals for sports stadiums. The Axe logo is festooned on the venue's menu, valet tickets and DJ booth, and clubgoers sample its products in the bathrooms. What the brand calls pop-up versions of the Axe Lounge have been staged elsewhere for shorter durations, including one in Miami in February while the city hosted the Super Bowl. The market for men's grooming products grew to $4.83 billion in 2009, from $2.38 billion in 1997, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm. Axe is widely credited for driving much of that growth, all but creating the male body spray category and continuing to enter categories that mainstream men's brands have historically avoided, most recently hair care, with Axe introducing shampoo in 2008. Since it was introduced in the United States in 2002, Axe has grown to dominate the deodorant body spray market, with a 36.7 percent share in 2009, from just 9.9 percent. The current share is far ahead of Tag, a Procter & Gamble brand, with a 9.9 percent share. In the shower gel category, however, Axe has been overtaken by Old Spice, also a Procter & Gamble brand. This is partly because of the success of two commercials -- the first released in February and the second in June -- that feature the chiseled actor Isaiah Mustafa as the Old Spice Man and that have garnered more than 31 million views on YouTube combined. In the four weeks ended July 12, 2009, Axe had a 7.7 percent share of the overall liquid body wash market, and Old Spice, 6.2 percent, according to SymphonyIRI Group, a market data firm whose totals do not include Walmart. In the four weeks ended this July 11, Axe's share had slipped to 5.9 percent, and Old Spice's had climbed to 10.1 percent. Axe spent a total of $125 million on advertising in 2009, and Old Spice spent $36 million, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Coming Axe Music shows will be in Los Angeles in September, Chicago in October and Las Vegas in November, with the brand revealing the performers, sites and dates in stages beginning a few days before each. The brand's website and Facebook page, meanwhile, will feature video from previous shows. 'This is something unique and quite talk-worthy in social media and digital space,' Dwyer of Axe said. 'But we think that the real sizzle will come from whether you're at the show or not.' 