• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 15, 2006

With greater sports marketing expertise now in-house courtesy of the Gillette acquisition, Procter & Gamble plans to do more in the area--and not just to reach men.

P&G has created a sports marketing "center of expertise" to explore new opportunities--an initiative with roots in a "best practices review" Gillette conducted before the merger. The results have been transferred to P&G.

While Gillette has been a major sports marketing player for a century, perhaps P&G's most notable foray has been Tide's sponsorship on the NASCAR circuit. So, could Charmin, Cascade and Pampers get into the game?

"Gillette has used sports marketing to forge an emotional connection by associating their brand with their prime prospects' passion for sports," said Susan Arnold, P&G's vice chair for beauty and health. "And it's important to note that the prime prospects we reach with sports marketing are not just men. This is a real top-line opportunity that will come from the skill synergy between P&G and Gillette."

And some sports marketing programs could cost the "new P&G" less than what the "old" Gillette paid to promote its razors. P&G CEO A.G. Lafley said the merged company's scale has created marketing efficiencies.

"We learned from the Gillette acquisition that our media costs were significantly lower than theirs prior to (the) acquisition," he said.

Sports marketing was one of three areas that Arnold identified as arenas with a high ROI that P&G is emphasizing--interactive and "influencer-marketing" were the other two. (Arnold and Lafley spoke Thursday at a P&G meeting with analysts.)

Those tactics, Arnold said, "consistently deliver financial returns above traditional TV (and) print advertising."

While Arnold said TV and print efforts still work alongside new media, a shifting focus in spending at P&G could have a significant impact on how various media outlets fare going forward, if it hasn't already. On one level, the company--with 22 brands with $1 billion in annual global sales--is regarded as a thought-leader that could prompt others to follow. More practically, it's the country's largest advertiser, and spends some $8 billion on marketing worldwide each year.

Arnold said P&G views "interactive" as a strategy that promotes some sort of "two-way interaction with consumers," listing options including e-mail, online communities and mobile. The seemingly inexorable proliferation of high-speed Internet access--she cited research showing it will be in 300 million homes worldwide by 2008--will transform the Web to become principally a source for entertainment, she said.

"Our job is to inform and entertain those consumers better than anyone else in our industry," Arnold said. "We're doing this well already in a few places, but we're focused on expanding our list of successes."

P&G's interest in converting "influencers" to its brands--who then create interest among others--is driven by its marketing ROI analyses that seek "more impact out of every marketing dollar," she said.

Arnold cited more conventional influencers such as journalists and medical experts, but said the company has a particular interest in "family and friends." She said they are "often the most powerful" because they "add credibility and relevance (and) they naturally get the attention of consumers when and where they're most receptive."

Much has been made about marketers' increasing interest in taking a "media neutral" approach, where consumer behavior drives a marketing plan, not specific media options. And Arnold emphasized that P&G has reengineered its communications planning around that line of attack.

She said as recently as five years ago a new marketing program would usually begin with the conception of a 30-second spot, while other media were "often just an afterthought."

Now, like many marketing gurus, she said a campaign is driven by a "big idea." That, in turn, leads to questions about which media options should be employed "based on when, where and how the prime prospect will be most susceptive."

She cited efforts for Always, where teen consumers typically don't warm to TV spots for the brand, instead preferring outreach efforts in schools and ads in retailers' dressing rooms.

Contributing to development of the "big idea" is the more than $200 million a year that CEO Lafley said P&G is investing in consumer understanding. He said the company has moved away from behind-the-mirror focus groups and focused on immersion research, where researchers live and shop with consumers, "becoming a part of the fabric of their lives."

"This gives us the ability to look at consumer research through a whole person's lens," he said. "We know more about more aspects of consumers' total eyes; this helps us see innovation opportunities others may miss."

And, he said, P&G moves aggressively to share insights internally, having put a system in place to transfer information across 40 categories and countries.

"We can transfer what we know about consumers and shoppers across more categories and markets than any other company in our industry," he said.