Students of marketing today, especially "sports marketing," are fascinated by the incredible story of Gatorade. Timothy Communications was privileged to provide some strategic marketing and public relations support for Gatorade during its dizzying rise from an $80 million brand in 1982 to something well over $2 billion by the time we left in 1997. Gatorade is a $4 billion sports drink today and sold throughout the world.
Twenty-five years ago, however, Gatorade was a quaint little regional sports drink with fully 25 percent of sales in Florida alone. That's when Chicago ad executive Paul Brickman hired me and a colleague away from the nation's largest independent PR agency to generate some favorable publicity. As a former sports writer and avid softball player in leagues all around Chicago, I was the proverbial "kid in a candy store" when Gatorade gave me access to the inner sanctum of major college and professional sports.
But the assignment was to generate favorable "publicity" for Gatorade, and discerning newspaper editors would have none of it. Gatorade lacked the persuasive scientific research it has today (search the Internet for Gatorade Sports Science Institute, circa 1985). I was selling blue sky. So my first three months on the Gatorade account were all about having my head kicked in by every daily newspaper editor in America.
As luck would have it, my boss Mr. Brickman had befriended Gene Gieselmann, then the longtime head athletic trainer of the St. Louis Baseball Cardinals. When the Cardinals came to Chicago to play the Cubs in the spring of '82, we offered Gene an opportunity to make media appearances on behalf of Gatorade.
The conditions and the economics of Gatorade's first "traveling spokesperson" program were perfect. St.Louis, being a river city with stifling heat and humidity in the summer, made Gene a very credible expert to explain how Gatorade helps prevent dehydration and improves athletic performance.
And the PR costs were negligible. The Cardinals were paying Gene's travel expenses, of course, and we didn't have much trouble setting up interviews for Gene around his baseball schedule. And then there was the fact that Gene was on very friendly terms with Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog, who only happened to be the best field commander in the game at the time, and a TV darling. At Gene's request, not ours, Herzog made it his custom to lean on one of those big orange Gatorade coolers in the corner of the dugout during games, many of which were nationally televised.
By September of '82, in addition to Gene's scheduled Gatorade chats on talk shows and with newspapers, Whitey Herzog was getting plenty of close-ups during a very good Cardinals' season. By the time the playoffs started, we didn't think things could get any better, but they did. The Cardinals defeated the Milwaukee Brewers in one of the coldest World Series in history, in seven games no less, which maximized Gatorade's TV exposure. Even in the cold, when dehydration was of little concern, TV viewers almost always found Herzog leaning on Gatorade, as it were, with the logo turned just so.
NFL athletic trainers took notice. Just two games into the 1982 football season, their players went on strike, leaving them with plenty of time on their hands. So one week into the players' strike, I got a call from then Atlanta Falcons head trainer Jerry Rhea, who was President of the fledgling Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society (PFATS). "We know about your program with Gene Gieselmann," he said. "We'd like to remind you that Gatorade has a sponsorship agreement with the NFL (and not with MLB at the time). We need to talk, and seeing you down here in Atlanta tomorrow wouldn't be too soon."
The next day Gatorade became the first official corporate partner of PFATS, which led to an ocean of Gatorade TV exposure on NFL games ever since. And here's what historians should know about that arrangement, as so few do. NFL athletic trainers were not seeking money or remuneration. Ironically, their mission was to leverage Gatorade's "publicity power" to make parents and school administrators aware that 95 percent of the six million high school athletes in the U.S. were virtually unprotected from preventable injuries and re-injury.
They wanted all interscholastic athletes to have the injury prevention protection only nationally certified athletic trainers could provide. Yes, it's true that NFL athletic trainers were helping to create jobs for their younger counterparts graduating college, the vast majority of whom were earning advanced degrees. But their end game was to get allied health care professionals on the sidelines of high school sports to prevent and manage some two million injuries that occur every year.
The Quaker Oats Company of Chicago acquired Gatorade as part of its Stokley-Van Camp purchase in 1983. Over the next 15 years, about half of my Gatorade-financed work was actually public relations for NFL trainers, and for Major League Baseball trainers, and then NBA trainers. I opened my own PR shop in 1985 to have the freedom to serve as Communications Director for the National Athletic Trainers' Association (1985-90).
In 1986, four years after the Cardinals got the Gatorade ball rolling with their World Series championship, linebacker Harry Carson of the New York Giants started dunking Gatorade over the head of coach Bill Parcells to celebrate victories. And right on cue, the Giants went on to win the Super Bowl that season.
Then in 1987, Sue Doten Wellington, the true genius behind Gatorade's success who would go on to become the first woman to preside over a division of Quaker Oats, had the good sense to send free Gatorade coolers to most high schools throughout the U.S. That sealed it. Gatorade became "essential sideline equipment" in school-based sports across America.
And that's how Gatorade became one of the most recognizable and widely visible logos in the world. Athletic trainers put the Gatorade brand on their backs and took it to the heavens, because they wanted to raise the profile of their profession and protect high school athletes from injury. They remain trusted partners with Gatorade to this day, and have quadrupled their ranks to about 35,000.
But let the record show that the catalyst was Gene Gieselmann of the Cardinals, with a big assist from manager Whitey Herzog, along with those zillion newspaper editors who rejected every pitch I made for Gatorade publicity and effectively told me to "go outside and just holler fish!"
-John LeGear, President
Timothy Communications Inc. (TimComm.com)
