Game of Brands: Startups vs. Blue Chips

A Veteran Marketer Looks Back on His Career and Forward to Examples of How Legacy Competition Is Forever Changed. 
 

- Dave Knox

When I started at Procter & Gamble, my first job was in a group called AP/DO, otherwise known as “deodorant” to normal people.

I was on the Secret Brand Team where I found myself in the middle of the deodorant wars between P&G (Secret and Old Spice) and Unilever (Dove, Degree and Axe).  It was a “battle” that both sides took seriously, leading the head marketer at Unilever to have a P&G-branded doormat outside his office and for Degree to buy a billboard that mocked our Secret advertising right outside the P&G company cafeteria. 

Talk to anyone that grew up in the world of brand marketing and they will tell you similar big brand war stories whether it is Coke vs. Pepsi, Crest vs. Colgate or Ford vs. Chevy.

Competition is nothing new to brand marketers who spent every Monday looking at the latest weekly share reports. But over the last five years, category after category and brand after brand has woken up to realize that the competition has changed. Consider that in 2015, Catalina found that 90 of the top 100 CPG brands lost market share over the previous year.