Great buy. Review on Jovan Musk

Jovan, Inc., a small fragrance marketer, spiced up consumer advertising and the fragrance industry in the mid-1970s. Executives at the company used blatant sex appeals to boldly introduce a line of musk-oil-based colognes and perfumes. With no previous experience in the fragrance industry, Jovan's founding executives implemented a sexual marketing strategy that proved to be a very smart venture. The company's success was linked to its Jovan Musk Oil, introduced in 1972. Bernard Mitchell and Berry Shipp were looking to get into a new line of business in 1968 when they founded Jovan with a mink bath oil product. Richard Meyer, a Chicago ad executive, soon joined Jovan to write the ads and creatively manage the fragrance campaigns. Meyer eventually became president of the company.

Shipp was passing through Greenwich Village when he saw lines of young people buying small bottles of full-strength musk from street venders. Musk, a synthetic version of an animal pheromone, was marketed for its ability to enhance sexual attraction. Shipp carried the idea back to Jovan, and soon the company was producing a fragrance based largely on musk. Until then, musk had been used only in small amounts as a fragrance additive.

This product is one of the best advertised having won awards for its ads; the product itself is no less and in the words of the company was "[a] provocative blend of exotic spices and smoldering woods interwoven with animal musk tones." The anti-packaging, this brown bag approach, fit the spirit of the '70s.

Its one of the oldest and most smooth, unbashed frangrances that speaks of man as a sexual being, as being old world and a true no-nonsense image. When the fragrances for women were launched a few years after the range for men, it brought to women the same power that it gave men, one of being the seductress, of being powerful, the queen, the Cleopatra, the Helen of Troy......... I would suggest their range of products to everyone because every drop is worth it!

Until Jovan's brazen advertising approach, fragrance ads had been mysterious and subtle about the seductive powers of their perfumes. According to an Advertising Age writer, "Perhaps it is because the company's blatant claims about enhancing the sensual characteristics of a woman's basic animal instincts exploit what the more decorous fragrance marketers have only been hinting at for years." Another writer observed that Jovan had ignored the "mystic marketing approach beloved by established fragrance houses"-much to its own success. Jovan's success was also tied to is distribution strategy. Unlike most advertised fragrances, Jovan mass marketed its products like packaged goods instead of upscale, image-conscious products. Compared to most colognes and perfumes, Jovan was very competitively priced.

More important, Jovan's appeals resonated with consumers. In 1976, Jovan was third in market share for men's fragrances and tenth for women's lines. Although market share for men's fragrances was a fifth of the market for women's fragrances, Jovan exploited a male market that was just beginning to take interest in personal care. As a result of its success, Jovan was bought for $85 million by British conglomerate Beecham. With over 97 percent of the purchase price going to Jovan's three top executives, it's fair to say that they "got their share."