We’ve actually developed training programs with a number of our professional athletes—guided training curriculum for you based on what your goal is.Then we can also enable fuel kits [to] be sent to your house on demand. They can be personalized for you, so if you’re training for a marathon, we have a kit that can be developed for you specifically and then shipped to you.
We’ve also recently added the capability—with our new Gatorade Smart Bottle—to track how much hydration you’re taking in throughout the day. It will remind you and ping you if you’re ahead or below your training goals from a hydration standpoint.
We have the Gx app sweat patch—available to consumers in the athletic channel online and at high schools—which is a patch you can wear that can tell you your unique sweat type and what your unique hydration needs are. We also have a range of Gatorade pods that fit into our Gx bottles that can be specified down to different ranges of carbohydrates and different ranges of electrolytes based on your individual sweat type.
We’re selling all that on our [direct-to-consumer] platform. we’re embedding it in high schools, colleges and universities for some of our most elite athletes. Something that we’re extremely focused on with the Gx platform is our move into purpose and sustainability. We’ve seen with our athletic equipment business—it’s already [a] best-selling piece of athletic equipment at Dick’s Sporting Goods—and we are aggressively moving our portfolio towards sustainability, into a beyond-the-bottle franchise.
How do you get consumers to buy into the Gx products?
We’re driving a lot of user acquisition through our in-person interactions, as well as through a lot of our grassroots activation in the high school community space.
We have part of our team out in the field, regularly giving nutrition education to high school athletes, coaches, trainers to make sure that they’re doing the right thing for themselves as they learn and grow.
Broad-reaching professional athletes have been a cornerstone of Gatorade’s marketing for decades, but the expansion of its portfolio is taking it into more niche communities. Does that change the brand’s endorsement strategy at all?
We are absolutely working to open the aperture of performance and wellness athletic performance as a bonus for all athletes, no matter where you are in your journey.
We are broadening and innovating in new spaces to bring in new users, to give solutions for individuals who haven’t had them before. But performance athletes remain our core and where we spend a lot of our time. We have a lot of our Gatorade Sports Science Institute team researching and embedded with athletes across the world. We’re developing specific solutions for individuals on the field with a number of our athlete partners, our team partners and our focus on working with the greatest athletes in the world and providing them solutions from from the minute we started working with them is never going to change.