Sports Marketing to Grow for Proctor and Gamble

2007 should be an extremely interesting year for P&G and its role with sports marketing. In the past, the company’s sports marketing involvement revolved around its Tide sponsorship with NASCAR. The company offered a plethora of consumer products, but stuck with traditional marketing practices. Now that P&G purchased Gillette, the company will have the ability to learn from gurus on how to secure ROI from sports sponsorships.

In Boston, Gillette has always been considered a leader in sports sponsorship along with Bank of America, John Hancock, New Balance and Reebok. Now the leaders in Boston are New Balance, FSG, W. B. Mason and Reebok.

Eric Kraus has overseen Gillette’s sports marketing division for years. While I have never met him personally, I have heard nothing but great things about him. The company sponsors the football stadium at Foxboro and I believe they use to have sponsorships with the Celtics and Bruins, but that is not confirmed.

According to an article I read last month, "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."

If P&G is smart and they listen to Kraus, I’d expect them to sign some pretty impressive sports sponsorship deals this year.