Written on June 17, 2009

Submit your favorite sports business issue and how you solved it and we'll put it up online. Send to buffy@teamworkonline.com, and give us rights to publish it online with your email address.

Tom Cordova

How to breakthrough into new sponsorship categories, in this case consumer package goods

I was director of sales for the Oakland Athletics baseball team in the late 1980's. In a radical departure for the time, our team sold virtually all its inventory on an in-house basis. We were quite successful selling sponsorships, but the categories we filled were the typical ones such as cars, beers, hardware, restaurants and soft drinks. We needed to stretch.

Our challenge was to open new categories that were traditionally resistant to sports sponsorship. I set my sights on one of the most prestigious package goods companies on earth, Procter & Gamble.

The difficulty was that P&G didn't really need and had no interest in what we typically sold back then: positive exposure/brand awareness. They spent tons of money on television advertising, their brands were well known, and dominated the marketplace.

I met individually with a variety of P&G unit managers in the sectors of detergents, coffee, health and beauty aides, orange juice, and paper products. All sectors sold through major grocery chains, always aiming for special programs connected to end-of-aisle displays that were a coveted and highly competitive location. What P&G wanted was to sell incremental cases of products and do so at a promotional cost not exceeding $1 per case.

The Solution - Discovering the guiding principle and an effective metaphor.

I wondered what I could sell P&G that satisfied their needs, yet brought in revenue to the team. This was in my mind as I headed down to Scottsdale for the annual MLB marketing meetings.

The keynote speaker was one of my business heroes, Tom Peters. Author of many popular books including the seminal In Search of Excellence, Tom was extremely popular those days and in great demand as a speaker. Since Tom lived in the bay area, MLB lured him to the meetings by giving him tickets to the World Series that was happening in his area, the famous Earthquake Series between San Francisco and Oakland.

Swelling with pride from our sweep of the Giants we awaited the guru's keynote address. He quickly got our attention: "You guys in Oakland and San Francisco stink! Your bathrooms stick! Why should anybody need hip waders when using your bathrooms?"

The resulting moment of inspiration filled in all the blank spaces in my P&G equation. The core of the metaphor would be Clean. If the A's were going to dramatically upgrade cleanliness it would cost a ton of money. How could we do it? Procter & Gamble. Since P&G brands are famous for making things clean and smell nice, we can use our stadium as a showcase for P& G products, and in the process better serve our fans.

The concept was The Clean Team. A dedicated squad of janitors and matrons who were responsible for keeping ballpark bathrooms as clean or cleaner than the ones in our fans' homes. Procter & Gamble brands would be the sponsor and pay fees to pay for the additional labor. After the speech I laid my concept out for our resident marketing guru Andy Dolich and typical of his visionary approach he said "run with it!"

Every bathroom would be allocated one Clean Team member whose mission was to make certain that his or her bathroom was spotlessly clean throughout each event. We built stainless steel diaper changing tables in all the women's AND men's rooms and supplied free Pampers. We designed a special uniform with our iconic elephant holding a broom in its trunk. We promoted the heck out of it through in-stadium media. On launch day we had a jam-packed press conference and served lunch in the women's bathroom to dramatize our zeal. At that night's pregame we lined-up The Clean Team members and P&G district managers up and down the baselines before a crowd of 35,000. Fans were wildly enthusiastic about the program and gave an enthusiastic ovation to the charter members of The Clean Team. People were cheering for our janitors!

The package we sold to P&G included a whole slew of media avails, signage in all the bathrooms, A's merchandise, tickets of course and a bunch of experiences such as ceremonial First Pitches. I also created a number of baseball themed in-store promotions to help P&G sell-in the program to grocers. I accompanied P&G executives to presentations of each major grocer to set-up their sales pitches.

The Results: Unqualified success in every aspect. Every single major grocer bought into the program and bar code data revealed that 295,000 incremental cases of P&G branded products sold were directly attributed to the Clean Team.

A public relations tidal wave hit with virtually all bay area media outlets providing coverage and follow-up stories. USA Today and the Investors Daily did stories; Investors put it on the front page.

And it was a moneymaker for the team. The A's profited handsomely and elevated the existing perception that the Oakland Coliseum was a much more comfortable environment than Candlestick Park for attending a baseball game.

The Lesson: Think broadly on how to serve the needs of your prospective client while keeping in mind the commonalities between both sides.