Basketball star and edgy public persona Allen Iverson was the NBA’s Most Valuable Player last season. He took his Philadelphia 76ers to the NBA finals, and suddenly won the respect of a wider public, with brilliant play as well as a cleaned-up image. In November, he signed a lifetime contract with Reebok, extending a 10-year $50-million deal he signed when he turned pro in 1996. Now he’ll be wearing the Reebok brand for the rest of his professional career.

For a sense of how important this kind of deal can be, one need only look at what Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods did for Nike. And indeed the Iverson line is already one of the hottest brands in the athletic footwear world. Iverson’s seal of approval is a dream endorsement for any marketing executive hoping to sell flashy gear to millions of young basketball-obsessed consumers. In this case, that marketing executive is Mukesh “Micky” Pant, who took on the role of chief marketing officer at Reebok at roughly the same time the Iverson deal was announced.

Pant’s road to this position at the helm of one of the world’s most recognized brands took him across several continents. He was a chemical engineer at IIT when Unilever recruited him on campus for an engineering job. He had spent the previous summer working for Exxon in a major refinery and hadn’t particularly liked the experience. “I didn’t like the shop floor environment” he says. “Marketing was more smoke-free, and it looked fun and exciting.”

Unilever had a marketing position available and Pant asked to be considered for it. They took him on, and with that he left engineering behind for good. Thus began a 15-year career in marketing with the company that took him to the corporate headquarters in the U.K., where he worked on the Lipton Tea brand.

Lipton’s Iced Tea division was run by Pepsico, and Pant made contacts inside that company. So when Pepsi decided to make a major push into the Indian market in 1992, they hired him as a key member of their team.

“It was fun because India was somewhat of a socialist economy at that time, and Pepsi was the first high-profile multinational to make a big foray after 20 years of nationalization,” Pant says. Pepsi would successfully invest close to a billion dollars into the Indian market.

Then a headhunter from Reebok called Pant, and the veteran marketer was soon heading up marketing initiatives for Reebok in emerging markets like Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. He finally made his way to Reebok’s headquarters in Canton, Massachusetts two years ago.

Branding Edge

Pant points out that there’s a big difference between marketing soft drinks and other packaged goods and marketing Reebok. While tea hasn’t fundamentally changed for 5,000 years, and Coke’s formula is essentially fixed, Reebok comes out with a new line of products four times a year. But in the end it’s still a classic market share game. Pant’s new role is made doubly important by the fact that Reebok is making a push to claw its way back into a market that in recent memory has been thoroughly dominated by arch rival Nike.

“We estimate that Reebok has 10 to 11 percent share of display space in athletic specialty, behind its total market share of 12 to 13 percent, while we estimate Nike has approximately 50 percent share in athletic specialty, well ahead of its total market share of approximately 40 percent,” says a recent Merrill Lynch analyst report. Nike has risen to gorilla status in the athletic apparel world.

But the success of the Iverson line has created significant momentum for Reebok. The company is ready to launch various new products, beyond the Iverson brand, and how consumers accept those will in many ways determine how much shelf space, market share and revenue the company garners in years to come. Pant has a serious task in front of him.

“There’s a strong element of fashion,” he says. “What constitutes fashion is very difficult to understand.” So in addition to the general marketing and communication through advertising that he used to do at Unilever and Pepsi, Pant deals with events, endorsements and the creative task of “creating a buzz.” That’s where figures like Iverson come into the picture.

“With Iverson there’s an attitude and a fan following. People want to be like him and look like him. He lives on the edge,” says Pant. “We believe his attitude reflects a great quality — having come from a very difficult set of origins he has matured into not just a fine athlete, but also a good human being. Having said that, there is some enduring quality of his rebelliousness that he has kept, like his tattoos and hairstyle. And he has also stayed true to his friends, who go back many years to the time when he didn’t have any money. The urban male follows basketball very passionately and they know who’s genuine and who’s not. And compared to many others, Allen has a genuine quality.”

Pant seems to feed off of Iverson’s energy and ‘vibe.’ Both Iverson’s on-court basketball shoe (the “DMX”) and his “Off The Clock” (OTC) line of fashion apparel are central to Reebok’s product line — and the slogan “Defy Convention” is directly tailored to his unique appeal.

But Reebok’s endorsement machine is a huge operation. Tennis sensation Venus Williams was signed by Reebok when she was 12, and the day we spoke to him, Pant had a meeting with a young tennis player that the company’s talent scouts have spotted. Reebok works with dozens of emerging athletes — enough, according to Pant, to make up a list in small font that runs into 10 pages. But only one out of 20 will ever hit the big time. A very generous package is included for athletes who do hit the top ten in the world in their sport, and even more for those who reach the very top of their sport — wining a basketball MVP or a grand slam in tennis.

Naturally, Iverson’s tattooed arms and breathtaking diamond jewelry don’t appeal to all of Reebok’s target customers. Pant is tasked with careful stewardship of the highly recognized Reebok brand and logo. “There is no formula,” he admits, “because if there was, all brands would be successful.”

But he has some basics he keeps in mind. “You have to make your brand stand for something so that if it were a human being it would have a personality. And you’ve got to decide if that’s male or female, if it’s young or old or if it’s aggressive or conventional. In a variety of ways you define the brand position, and the key is to be consistent with it,” he says. But the idea of brand consistency and positioning is changing. Pant points out that there has been a decline in the use of staple broadcast TV advertising, in favor of more targeted media — notably cable TV, but also new technology vehicles.

Brands no longer have to be as restricted in their message. “We appeal to young men, older men, women, and kids,” says Pant. “It is possible to have a different brand image for different target groups. For young African American males, basketball and Allen Iverson are important. For women in the age of 30 to 35, fitness and looking good are very important. These two are very different things, and you shouldn’t have to be one or the other to be successful.”

Pant guides the use of Reebok’s hefty $250-million annual global marketing and advertising budget, more than half of which is spent in the U.S. alone. “Within those numbers, you have to make a bet in terms of what segment of the market will expand in the future — men’s, women’s, basketball, running,” he says. “You have to make smaller bets on each one, and then send out a message that’s relevant.”

To create the message, Pant turns over responsibility to advertising agencies Berlin Cameron and The Arnell Group. “The culture of creating advertising is very different from the culture of running a business,” he says. Reebok specifies the objectives and target audience, and the agencies come back with creative ideas.

In the end it’s a dogfight. “We do live in the sports industry, which is perhaps the most competitive in the world,” says Pant. Nike, Fila, Asics, Puma and many others are fighting not to give up any ground. “We try not to get too distracted by what they do, otherwise you tend to follow them. It’s a good idea to keep an eye open. If there’s something dramatic happening — with a new brand particularly — it’s good to see what’s working, and if you’re competitive,” he says. “We do the traditional stuff: Nielsen data on market share, and brand image monitoring. We have intelligence in the market, which tells us what our competitors are working on with regard to their advanced products, and we factor that in.”

However diplomatic Pant chooses to be, the obvious corporate goal is to gain ground on Nike. In a business all about the public perception of what’s fashionable, falling asleep at the wheel on a competitive front could be disastrous.

The company has just unveiled a new product line targeting young males called the RBK Collection. Merrill Lynch, while it has upgraded Reebok stock to a “buy” rating and is fairly positive about the company’s future, doesn’t feel that Reebok’s high-performing footwear brands (Iverson and Classics) will grow much larger in the U.S. Footwear is 32 percent of the company’s business. So new products will have to fuel what investors have seen as fairly lackluster topline revenue growth. This reliance on new product launches clearly puts pressure on Pant to perform.

According to Merrill Lynch, “specialty retailers want to give Reebok a shot at more shelf space — Iverson is doing well (it is virtually the only basketball footwear not being marked down), and Foot Locker certainly wants to pressure Nike for bigger discounts.” But the report also ads, “Nike will fight any reduction in shelf space tooth and nail.”

Either way, what Pant does for the Reebok brand today, will be crucial to the bottom line of Reebok’s business in the next few years. Consumers will need time to react to new offerings, and a real resurgence in competitive position for the company will likely take more than just a few quarters.

Click To Buy
Internet advertising has seen a tough ride recently, as major advertisers realize that banner ads aren’t what they were cracked up to be. That said, Pant is still optimistic about the future of new technologies for the marketing world.

“You have to watch out for clutter because if consumers get sick of Internet advertising they will find ways of filtering it out,” he says. “But the fact is that so much time is being spent today on wireless communication, through cell phones or Blackberrys or the Internet. That’s bound to be an important medium for advertising. I’m not sure what shape or form that will take going forward, but I’m certain it will be very large.”

As a big advertising spender, Pant gets proposals all the time from vendors with the latest Internet advertising technology. He is evaluating some products seriously at the moment. “The thing is to make sure that you don’t reach the point of irritating the consumer with a message when they don’t expect it, because that can actually work against you,” he says.

He has a less conventional vision of Internet marketing: “People can be looking for certain information, and we feel that we can be helpful providing that information — not trying to sell a Reebok product, but helping them get fit, or giving them information on running or how to play better. That sort of thing is an area that I think it will work in the future.” The Internet, in this sense, becomes not an advertising medium, but a medium for the effective communication of detailed information, which helps to build a brand.

What seems to excite Pant most about new technology vehicles is the segmentation of various different targeted messages that they allow — what cable TV has enabled, but to a greater extent. Times are clearly changing.

As Pant guides Reebok’s branding, new Reebok athletes will likely become stars, consumer tastes will shift and consumer habits will change. And he will need to stay one step ahead of it all to catch the eye of his customer.

Coming out with a marketing message that doesn’t fly will mean serious news come earnings time in 2003, when investors will be looking for concrete signs that the Reebok brand is on the upswing.
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