Evolution of Product Management
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
THE ORIGIN:
➢ The idea of product or brand management began at Proctor & Gamble in the early 1930s. ➢ All began with a memo directed to the head of the advertising department by Neil McElroy on May 13, 1931 and ran to three pages – considerably more verbose. ➢ McElroy was thus the obvious man to grow and plant the embryo of brand manager system. ➢ McElroy was heading the new soap product “Camay” which was directly in competition with Ivory. ➢ Camay presumably because management had foreseen that two brands competing for different segments of the same market would need different advertising and ultimately a competitive approach. ➢ Neil McElroy experienced internal company competition at the sharp end. ➢ McElroy was further the right man at the right time since he was one of P&G’s very brightest managers of the company and became Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defence. ➢ McElroy argued that the manager of a particular product should have overall line responsibility for that product – be, in effect, the chief executive of a one-product company, responsible for that product’s success in the market. ➢ Lever and P&G were two leading companies in world of brand marketing. ➢ Each company would probably have more than one product in the market, each aimed at a different group of consumers. ➢ Segmentation was the name of the game. ➢ Internal competition and rapid growth in company size made product management or brand management a necessity. ➢ Giving each product its own committed advocate was the obvious way to combat the tendency for some products to be more favored by management than others, and to make sure that each got its share of resources and ideas and was able to compete effectively. ➢ Ivory was the most important brand and would have probably starved Camay at birth. ➢ As Companies developed more and more products they were inclined to lose each
THE ORIGIN:
➢ The idea of product or brand management began at Proctor & Gamble in the early 1930s. ➢ All began with a memo directed to the head of the advertising department by Neil McElroy on May 13, 1931 and ran to three pages – considerably more verbose. ➢ McElroy was thus the obvious man to grow and plant the embryo of brand manager system. ➢ McElroy was heading the new soap product “Camay” which was directly in competition with Ivory. ➢ Camay presumably because management had foreseen that two brands competing for different segments of the same market would need different advertising and ultimately a competitive approach. ➢ Neil McElroy experienced internal company competition at the sharp end. ➢ McElroy was further the right man at the right time since he was one of P&G’s very brightest managers of the company and became Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defence. ➢ McElroy argued that the manager of a particular product should have overall line responsibility for that product – be, in effect, the chief executive of a one-product company, responsible for that product’s success in the market. ➢ Lever and P&G were two leading companies in world of brand marketing. ➢ Each company would probably have more than one product in the market, each aimed at a different group of consumers. ➢ Segmentation was the name of the game. ➢ Internal competition and rapid growth in company size made product management or brand management a necessity. ➢ Giving each product its own committed advocate was the obvious way to combat the tendency for some products to be more favored by management than others, and to make sure that each got its share of resources and ideas and was able to compete effectively. ➢ Ivory was the most important brand and would have probably starved Camay at birth. ➢ As Companies developed more and more products they were inclined to lose each