The Cutting Edge

The January announcement of Procter & Gamble’s intent to buy Gillette for $57 billion dollars made me scratch a few numbers. If one of your great grandfathers had bought a share of the Gillette Safety Razor Co. at its issue in 1903 (like none of mine did), that $2 investment would be worth $1.14 million today.

Who knew the first 40 years of this new product’s marketing innovations would forever redefine the advertising and promotional industry? In the beginning, many of those innovations were driven by one man — the inventor, the king of modern shaving: King Camp Gillette.

King Gillette was born in Fond du Lac, WI in 1855 to a prosperous and well-educated family. His mother, a graduate of Albion College, became famous as the author of a best-selling cookbook and how-to guide for young housewives. His father, a hardware merchant and sometime inventor, encouraged his sons to be entrepreneurs.

A born salesman, Gillette was a frustrated inventor until he met William Painter, the inventor of the modern bottle cap. Painter encouraged the young Gillette to create something small that had a frequent repurchase rate. “But how many things are there like corks, pins and needles?” Gillette wondered.

One morning during a sales trip, however, Gillette was shaving with a dull straight razor. Eureka! Why not create a handle that would hold a thin blade that could be made so cheaply that the user could throw it away when it got dull? Excited, he approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to advise him on how to manufacture his thin blade. The academicians at MIT told him it couldn’t be done.

“If I had been technically trained, I would have quit, or probably would have never begun,” he admitted later. Acquaintances would meet him on the street with “Well, Gillette how’s the razor?” and walk away roaring at the folly of his obsession.

In 1901, Gillette met William Emery Nickerson, an 1876 graduate of MIT who had the engineering knowledge to bring Gillette’s dream to life. (But for his completely inappropriate surname, we might all be buying “Nickerson Blades.”)

Gillette’s razors were an instant hit, despite the cost. The “handle” or razor itself with 10 blades sold for a whopping $5, a sum that represented a third of an average industrial worker’s weekly wage at the time. Retailers were getting 10 cents apiece for a blade that cost the company one cent to make — not a bad markup on a product that was usually replaced every five days. Eventually, the directors of Gillette realized they were in the blade business, not the razor business.

One of the company’s greatest early tie-ins was with the Wm. Wrigley, Jr. Co. The pre-eminent chewing gum firm wanted to introduce its new PK flavor of gum with a bang, so it bought a million Gillette razors for 15 cents each, and offered the razors free by mail with proofs from the gum pack. Later, William Wrigley himself met a Gillette executive at a party and joked that he should have got the razors for free for all the publicity he generated, to which the Gillette executive is reported to have answered, “PK gum could only have been introduced by the Gillette razor.” Over the years, banks, hotels and various consumer products clamored to tie-in with the revolutionary new men’s product that delivered an upscale male audience. Some of those deals generated 10 times the sales of the Wrigley offer.

Advertising and promotion were enormously important to sales success, according to Gillette’s managers. In 1910, the company used baseball great Honus Wagner to extol the benefits of the razors. Gillette’s association with Major League Baseball ranks as the longest continuous sponsorship of any professional sport. Its first major sponsorship was for the 1938 World Series, at a cost of $100,000. Gillette was the exclusive radio sponsor for the series for years, a position that it carried over to television until the late 1950s.

Without a doubt, however, its greatest sponsorship innovation was “The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports,” first heard on radio during the summer of 1941. Heavily oriented toward boxing, then at its nadir as a sport, the weekly series quickly embraced a host of other sports as well. Once again, Gillette was showing other marketers how to capture the male audience by owning the rights to the most popular sports events of the era and then bombarding the listening audience with its commercials and sports-related promotions.

By the 1940s, the company was regularly giving away its razors with the sure knowledge that once consumers owned the Gillette razor, they would keep using Gillette blades. Generations of young men grew up marveling, “How can they afford to give away this razor?” never realizing that Gillette made its money on blade sales. At its height in the last century, Gillette owned 70% of the blade business.

Sadly, the company founder did not fare as well. King Gillette, whose image was on the wrapper of every blade his firm sold, may have been the best-known man in the world. Yet, he died in 1932 nearly bankrupt from poor investments and taxes. The company granted his near-penniless widow, Atlanta, a $200 per month pension in 1939.

Rod Taylor is senior VP-sales promotions and sports marketing for CoActive Marketing in Cincinnati, OH. He can be reached at [email protected].

Really Sharp Moves

Gillette launched a number of innovative sports marketing practices.

ENDORSEMENTS

No marketer has used professional athletes as endorsers for as long as Gillette. In 1910, baseball’s Honus Wagner began a tradition of athletes crediting Gillette with their clean-cut look. “Especially,” noted Wagner in print ads, “when I am on the road with the team. It makes shaving all to the merry.” Initially the company paid the athletes with a gold-plated razor. This evolved to a standard $500 fee in the 1950s. (I suspect it’s raised the rate a few bucks since then.)

INTEGRATION

Gillette aggressively included African-American athletes in its television commercials. Future Hall of Fame baseball players like Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Elston Howard and Maury Wills all starred in early Gillette commercials that featured them shaving on camera. Gillette led other marketers in this practice by decades, and did it without regard to complaints from some Southern broadcasters.

SOLE SPONSORSHIPS

When other companies were dabbling in sports marketing, Gillette was developing properties which it could launch as sole sponsor. In addition to its MLB sponsorship, Gillette created “Friday Night Fights,” a TV series that debuted in 1944. This was a gutsy move, given that there were only 5,000 TVs in the entire broadcast area at the time, primarily in bars. This series would stay on the air for the next 20 years, and still ranks as one of the longest running series in television history.