Spalding’s new

Spalding is playing stickball again. This time, the game is serious. New York City’s stickball renaissance prompted the second coming of the Spaldeen, a funny little pink ball first introduced 50 years ago, after kids started ripping the covers off tennis balls to play with the rubber cores. The product disappeared in 1978 when Spalding moved tennis-ball production overseas. Player requests prompted Spalding Sports Worldwide to start pitching the ball again this year, and sales have been so hot that the company ramped up production. These days, Spaldeen has its own production lines, a spotlight in the New York Daily News’ 80th anniversary Stickball Classic, and an event-marketing strategy.

It’s the perfect metaphor for Spalding’s own renaissance. The Chicopee, MA, company built a marketing services department from scratch following its 1998 restructuring under owner Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts to better compete in the $17.8 billion sporting goods business. Spalding brought in Kraft Foods veteran Jim Craigie as president-ceo last December, and one of his first moves was to tap Kraft colleague Ed Several as vp-marketing services.

“I wanted pros who knew how to do promotion, direct marketing, and public relations,” Craigie says. “Those were a distraction to the marketing staff. They were trying to do too much, and weren’t doing any of it well. Now they can focus on brand strategy, and Ed focuses on promotions and custom products.”

Since Several joined in April, he’s hired a handful of top staffers, set the 2000 promotion calendar that was presented to the sales force last month, and staged four new campaigns.

“I haven’t slept since I got here, between building the organization and getting programs out the door, but it’s been an absolute blast,” Several says.

If ’98 was the year Spalding set the platform for growth, adding more than 1,000 staffers for a total of 1,900, then ’00 is the year sales should really take off. Spalding reports that first-quarter ’99 sales of $117.2 million were down 21 percent, after ’98 sales rose three percent to $803 million, per Hoover’s. (The sales slide was expected as Spalding pares flanker brands and weans retailers off low-priced, low-margin items.) Spalding ratcheted up its spending, putting $10 million behind Top Flite and $5 million behind Strata golf balls. That’s almost as much as the company’s total ad spending in ’98, $15.9 million, according to Competitive Media Reporting, New York City. (Spending through April was $7.9 million, down from $8.9 million the year before, CMR reports.)

Several’s team will handle some marketing disciplines in-house, including promotion, displays and merchandising, creative design, and the custom imprinting of Spalding products as premiums. While logoed golf balls have long been a popular business-to-business premium, Spalding is folding the promotional products business into its consumer marketing group to tap Several and his staff’s promotion expertise. (Promotional products account for five to 10 percent of total sales, but Craigie’s got his eye on a bigger piece of the $180 million custom golf ball business.)

MasterCard veteran Rob Cestone oversees custom products, using his financial services and packaged goods experience to help customers set their own promotion strategies with Spalding goods as premiums. For consumer marketing, Several tapped Kraft colleague Dan Bracken to handle merchandising and display, and is beefing up the inherited creative team led by Susan LaPoint.

Spalding wants these disciplines in-house “to infuse the organization with a culture in which everyone from top management to the plant floor recognizes we must deliver the best quality products that consumers will trust,” Several explains. “If we can bring the disciplines in-house, we can not only build our knowledge base, but also infuse it as a culture.”

Craigie’s vision is that Spalding will use consumers as its beacon – for product design, quality, and marketing. “Consumers were confused by too many flanker brands. For the last 10 years, Spalding’s had `flankeritis,’ launching 20 sub-brands to milk the business,” Craigie explains. “We’re refocusing them on our core brands.”

Several translates that into a marketing strategy: “It’s not how to sell in more product, but how to sell through more product. To do that, you start with what consumers want.”

If that sounds like packaged goods-speak, consider the source. Several spent 14 years at Kraft, and helped spearhead its Kraft Kids Task Force (see story below).

“[Kraft tie-in chief] Deb Sawch and I started in ’94 at ground zero,” Several says. “We knew what the task force would look like and how to get there – it was just doing it in a culture where people didn’t know how to bring very different divisions together to work as one. So we started with, `What do kids want?’ Here, our ground zero is, `What do consumers want?'”

Spalding will ferret out what consumers want through focus groups, in-market tests (several current programs could make the 2000 calendar), and work with retailers.

“Sporting goods retailers understand their consumers very well because it’s a very narrowly focused product line,” Several says. Spalding will share information gleaned in promotion tests while ramping up merchandising support.

Despite staffing up in-house, Spalding still uses promotion agencies. It’s working now with Colangelo Synergy Marketing, Stamford, CT, and Chicago, and is looking for one or two more shops to handle display work. There’s no formal review or timetable for assignments. “It’s not an urgent need,” Several says. “We’re going to see how the year plays out.”

First crack

The year will play out hard and fast, with four promos running between July 4 and December. First work from the new team, a Father’s Day-July 4 campaign for Top-Flite XL 2000 golf balls, is “a hallmark of how we’ll be operating,” despite its short four-week turnaround, Several says. Spalding sampled Top-Flite balls at golf courses. Pro shops ran a gift-with-purchase deal: buy a dozen balls, get a sleeve free. Brochures in pro shops, local p.r. for participating courses, and a dealer locator on www.spalding.com supported. Spalding’s goal was to sign up 2,000 courses; it got 3,700, more than a third of the 10,000 courses in the U.S. Several credits the early-summer timing and consumer focus. It was a fully integrated, turn-key program, which is rarer than a hole-in-one for golf courses. “We really touched on all aspects of what it would take to concentrate on the consumer and make it easy for golf shops to execute,” Several says.

An August promo for Strata golf balls gives a free Etonic golf glove with the purchase of a dozen balls. The brand will get aggressive sampling the rest of the year and next.

Spalding next milks its status as official ball-maker for the NBA with a holiday promotion that puts NBA-themed CD-ROMs in pack with Spalding basketballs. Developed with the league, the CD has games, music, links to nba.com and spalding.com, and a catalog of official NBA basketballs. Retail will support via circulars, and the NBA will flag the giveaway on its own ads. Senior brand manager Dan Touhey spearheaded the campaign.

Then there’s the Spaldeen. This summer and fall, Spalding tours stickball tourneys in New York City inviting consumers to sample the ball. (The Daily News’ tourney, co-sponsored by Spalding and Modell’s sporting goods stores, wraps up Sept. 18 after hosting 50-plus teams.) Spalding created a countertop display for retailers, and a Web site at www.spaldeen.com to post new games consumers have invented. The company plans to make two million balls this year, mostly to sell in New York City but also for transplanted New Yorkers in Dallas, Miami, and other Southern cities. It’s still branded “Spalding” on the ball, but the company adopted its bastardized Brooklynese handle, “Spal-deen,” for marketing purposes.

“We were flooded with calls, letters, and e-mails from people thanking us for bringing it back. They remembered it from their childhood,” Several says. Watch for more retail activity next year. “We’ve got a lot more we’re going to ramp up on. We’re trying to make it turn-key for retailers.”

Spalding needs to reassert itself with retailers, who dictated prices for Spalding’s under-marketed brands. “They were turning us into a store brand,” Craigie says.

Promos are designed to foster partnership with retailers. “If you have a product people want, the best promotion is getting them to try it, then having it available where they shop,” Several says.

“Retailers want consumer insights. Their needs aren’t different from grocers’, but the tactics are different because of scale. There are 10,000 golf-course pro shops, compared to 30,000 grocery stores,” he explains. “But each industry has planned and impulse purchase items. So if you understand how to attract consumers for each and give retailers programs that do that, you win.”

It’s a far more aggressive game plan than Spalding is used to, but Several insists that the old guard and new staffers are mixing well. “People [who’ve been at Spalding a long time] will come into my office and say, `How did this work in your old life?’ Sometimes I’ll ask, `How would this have been done at Spalding in the past?’ There’s a lot of sharing, and Jim [Craigie] has fostered that.”

Now that kids are aiming for the manhole covers in Brooklyn again, there’s no telling how far Spalding’s team will go.