Which Procter & Gamble executive wrote the 1931 memo that laid out modern brand management?

Procter & Gamble executive Neil H. McElroy wrote the 1931 memo that laid out modern brand management.

McElroy was a young advertising manager at P&G when he wrote a memo proposing dedicated responsibility for individual brands. His immediate concern was Camay soap, whose marketing needed closer, more systematic attention. The memo argued that a brand should have someone focused on studying sales, competitors, advertising, distribution and consumer response.

That idea helped establish P&G’s brand-manager system, in which managers treated brands almost like independent businesses competing for internal resources and consumer loyalty. The approach became one of the most influential organizational models in twentieth-century marketing and was later adopted widely beyond P&G.

The date is important: McElroy’s memo came decades before modern digital brand teams and formal brand-strategy departments. Edwin Artzt and A.G. Lafley were later P&G leaders, not the authors of the foundational memo. William Procter was a company co-founder, not the executive associated with this brand-management innovation.