Coty, like all companies that licence perfume brands (Lauder, Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Clarins, Beaute Prestige International, Arden), thinks extremely hard about the style of its brands’ scents. And Coty owns a lot of scent brands: Davidoff, Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs and Kenneth Cole, among others. Each brand’s aesthetic course is charted with the influence of a million marketing and corporate factors, but most sail in a generally consistent direction. This is how Coty guides Kenneth Cole.

The Kenneth Cole brand occupies an interesting place in the fashion world. It is known for its men’s shoes, followed by its men’s shirts, slacks and accessories (it is almost a shock to discover that Cole also designs for women), in a style cool enough to be cool in Denver and Chicago but not fashion enough to be “fashion”.

The course Coty has set for Cole’s scent collection — I have never gotten the slightest hint that Cole himself is creatively involved in the fragrances — is aimed like one of “Iron Man” hero Tony Stark’s high-tech missiles at the wallets of middle-class American men who buy their scent based on two factors: marketing, and the smell of their laundry detergent, deodorant or the soap in the showers at their gym. Cole’s scents sell extremely well and, because they use what must certainly be the least expensive raw materials available, undoubtedly provide a high profit margin. Coty builds and manages the collection expertly, it is commercially successful and, by any aesthetic measure, it is one of the worst collections of scent on the market.

The core Kenneth Cole aesthetic is reminiscent of aerosol deodorant: both the synthetic “oceanic”-scented molecules like Calone and the smell of the aerosol’s fluorocarbons. Take Reaction, for example: This is the smell of deodorant freshly sprayed from the aluminum can.

Black, a slightly more nuanced scent, created by perfumers Harry Fremont and Sabine de Tscharneris, is the smell of deodorant with a synthetic spice angle. It is the scent favoured by the former frat boy and college football player who is now a mid-level manager in a tie, intently following a PowerPoint presentation by the regional sales guys at the Tuesday 9am meeting. He is wearing Kenneth Cole shoes and a Kenneth Cole shirt; he looks like he drinks vodka martinis and smells like he arrived at the meeting freshly showered from his workout at the gym. Sexy, if that’s your thing. And for millions of men and the women who like them, it is. Coty knows what it’s doing.