Michael Jordan Scores With A New Fragrance

More Americans can identify a photo of Michael Jordan than can make a positive I.D. on Princess Di, Cindy Crawford, Whitney Houston, John Wayne or Bill Clinton. So naturally, sooner or later, there had to be a fragrance. The only wonder is that it took so long for Michael Jordan Cologne to be imagined, negotiated, developed, tested, packaged, introduced and - need we say? - sold like hotcakes.

Sondra Love, whose idea it was, says she'd been worrying for some little while that the rarefied world of designer fragrance marketing was losing touch with all the normal, ordinary, everyday kids-next-door out there in flyover country who hardly ever play polo or go yachting or wear all black and pierce their tongues and shoot heroin.

She'd flip through the ad pages of magazines, she says, and see zillions of fashion models who, beauteous as they might be, didn't look a bit like the kids she saw back home in Kentucky.

To Love, senior VP and general manager of Bijan Fragrances this conjectural abandonment of mainstream youth by the marketers of fragrance looked like a big mistake - and, if she could only find the right combination of product and personality, a gigantic potential opportunity.

Then the light went on in her head: Michael! Michael! Michael! Michael Jordan, despite being bigger, balder, quicker, richer, smarter, better looking, better coordinated and about 10 times as charming as any other living mortal, appeals to regular guys in a way that lots of male models don't.

Not that he knew anything about perfume, but did that matter?

Love figured most of Jordan's fans had seen him sail gorgeously through the air above the basketball court; the cologne could invite them to share some of his more private moments. No, nothing to do with sweat socks, jockstraps and smelly lockers, as his teammates - and no doubt lots of other people - kidded when they heard about it.

The cologne, as she imagined it, would be a sort of remembrance-of-smells-past, an olfactory memoir of Michael Jordan's private life. It would blend the smells of some of his favorite off-court things and places: the leathery smell of a broken-in baseball glove, the fresh-cut grass of a fairway, the cool evergreen smell of his boyhood home in the North Carolina hills, the crisp, high-ozone smell of a Costa Rican beach vacation, and the lightly musky, sensual scent of clean skin right out of the shower.

One clue to how well Jordan understands and how skillfully he manages his public image: The final element of the blend, the sensual component, had initially been called "sexy sensual." The minute he heard it, he said, "Stop right there and take out that word; I'm not sexy." The word went.

The press kit for the cologne's debut comes with five little vials, each containing the scent of one of the five elements. The one labeled "rare air" really does smell beachy, and "home run" definitely smells leathery, and "fairway" has a nice green, grassy smell. Mixed together they smell - a little disappointingly - more like men's cologne than anything else. But the smell is nice enough, and mercifully light and fresh-air-ish, which is right on trend at the moment.

Love's second bright idea was to distribute Michael Jordan Cologne through sporting goods stores as well as department stores to reach regular guys who don't spend much time hanging out at the perfume counter. It worked.

A couple of months ago, one newspaper, carried away by Michaelolatry, proclaimed Michael Jordan "the best-selling scent in fragrance history." "Really?" Bijan's PR guy said when told, sounding surprised. He said nobody tracks fragrance sales precisely enough to say Michael Jordan is THE best seller, but the launch has been "phenomenally successful." It won two Fragrance Foundation Fifi Awards - the perfume biz Oscar - one for best new men's fragrance and one for best packaging.

The last time Love saw Jordan play, she went down afterward to shake hands, and he introduced her around. "Hey, Sondra," Charles Barkley greeted her, "when are you going to do a cologne for ME?"

Could be a whole new ballgame for men's cologne marketing.