Calvin Klein Wrist Watches

CK Calvin Klein Watches

Calvin Klein founded his company in 1968. Since then the company has expanded to include 22 separate divisions. According to a D&B Business Background Report, --for which I paid $20.00 and which I am sharing with you for free (entre nous)--the jeans division, Calvin Klein Jeanswear, Inc. enjoyed sales of $462 million last year. That's wholesale, which means that total retail sales of CK jeans is a lot more (I hesitate to venture a guess on the retail figure). Obviously, Calvin Klein is not an idiot. On the contrary, he's probably one of the savviest marketers of the century. Let's not forget, were talking about pants. Almost a half-billion dollars wholesale worth of pants. And there are twenty-one other divisions.

Getting information about Calvin Klein, Inc. is not easy. It's privately held, so none of the usual business profile companies have any info on it. Also, it's highly compartmentalized, one division for watches, one for cosmetics, one for scarves, etc. Joe Public would have to spend $440.00 to get a complete picture of the company's financials from Dunn and Bradstreet. Believe it or not, it doesn't even have a web page although the DNS addresses: ck.com, ck1.com, ckone.com, calvin.com, and calvinklein.com are all registered with internic to Calvin Klein Industries, its subsidiaries, or associates.

So, if he is such a savvy businessman, how could he make a dreadful mistake like running ads that smack of child pornography? The answer, from a business perspective, is: it wasn't a dreadful mistake. Sex sells. Even that kind of sex. Sales of the jeans weren't affected at all by the negative publicity. Meanwhile, the distasteful ads generated thousands of column inches of free publicity.

Furthermore, the notoriety of the ads very possibly appealed to some significant segment of CK's end-user market, those in mainstream America who think they look like, or want to look like, the people in CK ads. Interestingly, the people who really do look like they belong in a CK ad probably can't afford CK jeans, or wouldn't buy them if they could. In essence, Calvin Klein and his marketing apparatus have engineered a cachet for their jeans intended to appeal to an end-user that doesn't really exist. The people who end up buying the product probably have nothing in common with the psychological, socio-economic or personality profiles of the personalities his models project as end-users in the ads.

In this ad for CKOne, a non-gender specific fragrance, we see a bunch of people arguing about something. The whole ad is an argument. Offensive v. defensive . Men v. women, hair v. no hair, feminine guys v. butch girls, etc. The only thing we assume they will all agree on is what fragrance to wear.