There’s an old saying that “Timing is everything,” and truth be told, it really is. If you look at the retail landscape, you’ll find that everybody and their brother wants to be merchandised in stores around the holidays. And for good reason. Consumers will spend $220 billion during the season this year.
Conversely, the period after New Year’s Eve traditionally has been regarded as a virtual “no-brands land,” so devoid of consumer interest that it seemed the only products worth merchandising were diet foods, gym memberships and snow blowers.
More than 25 years ago, however, where others saw a promotional wasteland, Procter & Gamble saw an immense marketing opportunity. It uses the “no-brands land” period to build what has been referred to as “the company’s aircraft carrier.” After all, the products P&G sells (toothpaste, detergent, toilet tissue and shampoo, to name just a few) know no seasonality. If anything, the company’s highly consumable brands are re-stocked every January by households that delay purchase to pay for holiday luxuries.
This mammoth promotion regularly involves more than 40 brands that field coupons worth more than $40. It’s both the largest volume-producing promotion of the year, as well as the program with the lowest participation cost.
Best of all, the downtime in January was turned around to create a window in which P&G could support a group that might otherwise be overlooked: mentally handicapped athletes.
The Special Olympics were started in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, whose siblings included not only the deceased president, but also a sister with mental disabilities. From a marketer’s perspective, one of the most appealing aspects of the program is that it’s a truly “bulletproof“ cause; there’s nothing that anyone could possibly say against it.
When the idea of tying in with the program first came to mind, P&G sent Bob Wientzen, director of Promotion & Marketing Services, to negotiate with the charity.
“I went to Washington with our agency to meet with Mrs. Shriver,” Wientzen recalls. “I explained that for every coupon we redeemed we would make a donation to Special Olympics, up to a fixed amount. I’ll never forget her looking at me and saying: ‘Let me get this straight: You take this to a store (holding up a coupon) and they give you money for it?’ She had no idea what a coupon was.”
Wientzen and his team received Mrs. Shriver’s enthusiastic blessing and returned to Cincinnati, where they eventually crafted what would become P&G’s largest promotion. Early on the company decided to tie-in with a direct mail company called Publisher’s Clearing House (PCH). PCH would become such a dominant selling force in the promotion that a generation of P&G sales people came of age referring to the effort as “The PCH.”
“It was the first really big corporate event out there,” Wientzen recalls: “It was so big that only a firm like Procter could have pulled it off. We were mailing to 61 million homes, running 500 GRPs of advertising and every major paper in the country had ads telling consumers to look for their envelope. Nobody could compete with it.”
“Once it established its track record, P&G owned the first half of January,” says Steve Buxbaum, former Colgate director of promotion. “We wanted to execute our own multi-brand promotion as early in January as possible, but P&G’s Special Olympics event pushed us to the back half of the month.”
The method P&G used to involve consumers was nothing short of groundbreaking. P&G’s coupon envelopes announced in bold print that they would donate to Special Olympics five cents for every coupon redeemed. An asterisk qualified that the company would donate up to a fixed amount ($1 million in the early years). P&G reached its capped donation amount by the first morning of in-home delivery.
After the first few years of trial and error, P&G developed a sales strategy that guaranteed success. Sales teams composed of account representatives from every division in the company would descend en masse on key accounts every July to present the coming January’s program. Customers used to laugh at how P&G’s salespeople would all meet in their lobby and have to introduce themselves to each other.
The Shrivers may not have known much about coupons, but they more than made up for this by who they knew. P&G had unwittingly tapped into a gold mine of celebrity presenters when they aligned with Special Olympics. By the early 1980s, P&G’s sales teams brought in A-List stars like Sally Struthers (All in the Family), Dick Sargeant (Bewitched) and Susan Saint James (McMillan and Wife), as well as a host of athletes like Olympian Rafer Johnson, baseball’s Johnny Bench and Pittsburgh Steeler Rocky Blier, to help make their presentations.
P&G even enrolled Eunice Shriver in one notable call. “We’d had a request from our Philadelphia district manager for a little help with one of their top accounts,” Wientzen recalls. “The customer involved had never cared much for Procter, and so when he was introduced to Mrs. Shriver, he ripped into her. ‘Of course, you know that P&G is just using your charity to sell more goods,’ he said. ‘They’re our largest corporate contributor,’ she calmly replied, ‘and we wish more companies would use us this way.’”
It became part of Procter lore that this account consistently supported Special Olympics afterward. P&G’s promotion has changed remarkably little in 27 years.
“Procter & Gamble has been one of Special Olympics’ pioneer partners,” says Tanya Baskin, vice president-corporate partnerships for the Special Olympics. “The relationship has blossomed, now providing international support in Puerto Rico, the Middle East and North Africa region.”
Rod Taylor is senior VP-sports and promotion for CoActive Marketing in Cincinnati. He can be reached at [email protected].
Lunch with Mr. Sam
P&G had plenty of success early on with its tie to Special Olympics, but it wasn’t until Wal-Mart stepped in that the partnership really took off, says Bob Wientzen former head of P&G promotion and marketing services.
A lunch was planned that brought together Sargent Shriver, a founder of the Special Olympics, and Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.
The two met at a small BBQ joint in Bentonville, AR. Walton pulled up in a beat-up, dusty Oldsmobile and after lunch, took the group on a tour of his first store in town and explained his theories of merchandising.
“It was quite informative, to say the least,” Wientzen says. “Sargent Shriver good-naturedly got on Sam about why didn’t he do something with our Special Olympics promotion.”
That year, tables for the Special Olympics promotion were set up in the front of every Wal-Mart, staffed by thousands of Special Olympics volunteers. “That effort gave the whole promotion a huge jumpstart,” Wientzen says.
Network
