The Jordan Effect

While Michael Jordan may be best known for his amazing basketball career, he also changed the way the sports and advertising industries collaborate. Although Jordan wasn’t the first athlete to be a spokesperson for a company, he was the first athlete to turn himself into a complete marketing tool. He has successfully turned his name and his image into a brand, a brand that can sell just about anything, from cologne to shoes to underwear and t-shirts.

Using Jordan as a spokesperson has given companies like Nike tons of credibility, popularity, and especially sales that the company might not have had otherwise. I remember reading somewhere that Jordan’s shoes, “Air Jordans” have their own branch within the Nike company, an impressive feat for an athlete and a pair of shoes.

We discussed all of this in class, but while doing some extra research for this blog, I ran into a New York Times article published in 1994 (right around the time of Jordan’s foray into professional baseball) that puts his popularity into yet another light. In the 1994 season, like in previous seasons, the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team, gave away approximately 46,000 tickets to a Sunday night baseball game. As usual, they distributed the tickets to local school kids, and given past experience planned on about 2,000 kids attending the game.

When Jordan was added to the Barons’ roster, expected attendance soared, and the Barons tried to recall the tickets to avoid having 46,000 kids attend a game in a stadium with a 10,000 person capacity. Needless to say, this decision did not go over well with the people who had received tickets, so the Barons decided to honor the tickets over a period of time, rather than at one single game.

This story just proves Jordan’s popularity among fans. Even in a sport where he did not excel, people wanted to see the legend play. His name sold several thousand tickets to minor league games, even though Jordan was an average baseball player at best. Although this example is slightly different from the ones we talked about in class, the idea is the same. Michael Jordan has become an amazing salesman as well as an incredible athlete.