28 Nov 2011 Gatorade goes back to the sport lab
More than 40 years after football players at the University of Florida first sipped what would soon become Gatorade, parent company PepsiCo is looking to move the brand beyond beverages – it is preparing a product lineup that will include energy bars, protein shakes, and other athletic snacks and supplements with the aim of expanding beyond the sporting-drinks market and seize a slice of the $20 billion sporting-nutrition sector.
In the same way PepsiCo rules the potato chip aisle, its Gatorade division has embarked on an audacious plan to cover the sports nutrition world with offerings to challenge a full spectrum of energy and after-workout “recovery” products, including energy bars, gels, protein shakes, and pretty much anything else athletes put into their bodies.
“One beverage can’t serve all your needs as an elite athlete,” says the brand’s chief, Sarah Robb O’Hagan. (Her official title is Gatorade president, North America, and global chief marketing officer, sports nutrition, for PepsiCo.) Gatorade’s goal is to go from a big fish in a $7 billion US sports-drink industry to an even bigger fish in a $20 billion sports nutrition market.
The plan so far is in its infancy, visible to the outside world mostly in the repackaging of its three core product lines—the G Series, G Series Fit, and G Series Pro. Each now comprises pre-, during-, and post-workout products labelled 01 Prime, 02 Perform, and 03 Recover. They require a flow chart to keep straight, and some industry observers view the metamorphosis warily as a work-in-progress.
“I think it’s a very confusing brand,” says Tim Hoyle, director of research for PepsiCo shareholder Haverford, a wealth management firm, and an avid cyclist.
Gatorade has its work cut out for it. It will need to persuade everyone from high school jocks to weekend tennis warriors that they should trade bananas for packaged carbohydrate chews, and peanut butter sandwiches for processed protein bites. And it must overhaul its distribution system. Instead of just stacking beverages high and selling them cheaply in grocery and convenience stores, the new strategy requires the company to rethink everything from advertising to in-store displays…
…PepsiCo recruited O’Hagan from Nike in June 2008 as Gatorade sales were grinding to a halt.
One of her first moves was to revive the idea of truncating Gatorade’s logo to a simple “G.” Unveiled in a mysterious Super Bowl ad in 2009 that never mentioned the word “Gatorade,” the G intrigued some consumers and baffled others. The intent, says Robb O’Hagan, was to appeal to a new generation and to develop a logo that can appear on a wider range of goods.
She also noticed the brand really wasn’t marketing to athletes. “The huge aha! for me was, ‘We’re an athletic performance brand, we’re selling in convenience stores, grocery stores, Wal-Mart, but we don’t even show up in a sporting goods store, in a cycling store, in a place where an athlete actually goes to equip themselves to play sports,’ ” she says. Robb O’Hagan has since brought Gatorade back to athletes and to the science that gave the brand its credibility…..