A management idea with a long international career began as a staffing question. Neil H. McElroy wanted additional personnel for brand work at Procter & Gamble. On 13 May 1931, he set out the responsibilities involved in a three-page internal memorandum. The subject was neither a new soap formula nor an inspired slogan. It was the organisation of work around a brand (McElroy, 1931).
That is precisely what makes the document important. Companies already knew how to place names on products and advertise them. A different problem concerned who, within a growing organisation, would remain responsible for connecting market knowledge, advertising, promotion and results. McElroy’s memo became a celebrated reference point for an answer: individual brands needed identifiable organisational responsibility.
The year 1931 is consequently a milestone in the history of the modern brand-manager system. It is not the birth date of brands or of every activity now described as brand management. The contribution is more specific. McElroy articulated an organisational arrangement for bringing existing activities together around particular brands. Its lasting significance rests on that coordination problem, rather than on a sudden discovery that products could be differentiated or customers could develop preferences.
Brands, brand management and the brand-manager system
Three levels need to be distinguished. A brand can exist as a recognisable sign and a set of associated expectations. Brand management concerns activities that shape that offering and its meaning. The brand-manager system is a particular way of assigning the work inside an organisation.
Low and Fullerton’s historical investigation showed that leading branded products were established before the managerial system developed. Their account traced brands and their administration from the later nineteenth century and emphasised the adaptability of the subsequent organisational arrangement (Low and Fullerton, 1994).
The distinction prevents two errors. The absence of a job title does not prove that nobody previously managed a brand. Equally, creating a position does not establish that brand work will be done well. An organisational solution must function in practice. McElroy’s contribution belongs particularly to the third level: assigning responsibility for bringing information together, initiating action and following through. This is a substantial managerial innovation without having to serve as the origin of every historical relationship between a named product and its buyers.
Camay and the problem of a brand within a portfolio
Historical research places McElroy’s thinking in his work on Camay. The soap competed against other manufacturers while also existing inside P&G alongside the established Ivory brand. A younger brand could therefore struggle for attention not only in the market but within the priorities of its own company (Aimé, Berger-Remy and Laporte, 2017).
The situation is organisationally revealing. A business with several brands is not simply one seller using different wrappers. Its offerings can address different buyers, expectations and competitive circumstances. If work is assigned entirely by function, the specific situation of a smaller brand may disappear between broader departmental priorities.
The challenge was consequently more than producing additional advertisements. Someone needed to examine that brand’s development as a connected problem. The portfolio created a requirement for sustained, differentiated attention. This interpretation explains the model’s practical context without implying that every later question of portfolio strategy had already been solved in 1931. The historical starting point was a particular coordination difficulty inside a business, not a comprehensive theory of all possible relationships between brands.
A request for personnel became an organisational document
McElroy wrote to support increased staffing. He outlined the work of the brand man, supporting personnel and field checking. The request therefore translated a general need for assistance into an account of responsibilities (McElroy, 1931).
This differs from a later textbook framework. The memo did not attempt a complete theory of brands. It addressed a particular working situation. Its practical character made the underlying idea transferable: other organisations could recognise a similar coordination problem even when their products were different.
Significantly, its introduction already referred to earlier work by brand personnel and contrasted previous burdens with the proposed staffing arrangement. It therefore also documented the development of existing practice. Even at the celebrated point of origin, the organisational idea was not emerging entirely from nothing (McElroy, 1931, p. 1).
Transfer was not automatic. A short document could make the arrangement intelligible, but adoption required decisions about people, budgets, reporting relationships and existing functions. Its subsequent fame should not be confused with immediate international diffusion. Between describing a role and establishing a functioning management system lay a separate historical process. The memo mattered because it expressed a workable organisational question with unusual clarity, not because three pages could remove all the difficulties involved in changing a large company.
Giving the brand a permanent organisational address
The central problem can be described as a question of address. When a brand disappoints, where does the question of why it disappointed go? Advertising staff can assess a message. Sales staff can explain dealer reactions. Manufacturing understands technical properties. Who connects the partial answers?
The brand-manager arrangement made the brand a continuing reference point for responsibility. Its importance lay in linking a market offering with an identifiable internal role, rather than handling the brand only when an isolated campaign required attention.
Analytically, this also changes the time horizon. An advertisement has a publication date; a brand has an ongoing development. Responsibility that survives a campaign deadline can connect observation, decision and subsequent review. It cannot guarantee that judgement will be correct. It can reduce the likelihood that unresolved problems remain between departments once a particular piece of work is finished. This is an organisational prerequisite for continuity, rather than proof that the holder of the role controls every contribution to the result.
Differences in results became questions to investigate
The responsibilities began with the brand’s development and included differences between territories. Strong and weak areas were not necessarily to receive identical treatment. The role involved investigating the circumstances behind an observed outcome rather than assuming that the number explained itself (McElroy, 1931).
The analytical consequence is substantial. A national average can conceal opposing local developments. An apparently successful brand may be losing ground in important districts. A uniform national response may consequently spend resources where the underlying obstacle is not present.
Consider an illustrative situation, not a claim about a documented P&G campaign. In one region, the product is readily available but unfamiliar. In another, buyers recognise it but rarely encounter it in shops. Increasing advertising everywhere addresses only part of the problem. Brand responsibility needs to distinguish the obstacles before choosing a response. The memo belongs within a development in which marketing tasks could be treated as problems of diagnosis as well as production: the first question was not always what communication to make, but what commercial condition needed to change.
Why direct market knowledge still mattered
Information cannot be reduced to the bottom line of an existing report. An unexpected outcome may generate a question the reporting system was not designed to answer. Someone then needs to investigate how retailers and customers experience the offering.
The connection between figures and direct knowledge is one of the more useful implications of the historical organisational problem. Central responsibility would achieve little if it merely administered information already available. It also needed a capacity to recognise what remained unknown.
That distinction matters particularly when results weaken. A fall may involve the product, its availability, new competition or an unsuitable appeal. The category in which the result is recorded does not supply the cause. Analytically, a brand role should separate these possibilities and connect the diagnosis with a justified action. This interpretation describes the potential value of the arrangement. It does not substitute for evidence that a particular intervention succeeded. The organisational innovation made a task more clearly assignable; it did not make the answer to every market question self-evident.
Connecting diagnosis, planning and follow-through
An organisation may describe a problem accurately and still change very little. Decisions, implementation and further examination stand between knowledge and improvement. Gaps appear when one department analyses, another authorises, a third executes and nobody knows who should check the eventual result.
The brand-manager system can be understood as an attempt to connect these transitions. The responsible individual did not need to perform every specialist task personally. The role needed to maintain attention to their relationship.
The contribution was therefore also procedural. A brand required a connected sequence of decisions, not merely a creative proposition. Once action had been chosen, implementation had to be organised and its consequences examined. Continuing responsibility made it harder to treat a campaign launch as the end of the commercial problem. Such an arrangement could support learning because observations returned to someone expected to remain concerned with the brand. It did not remove conflicting interests or uncertainty about causes. Those remained problems to manage within the structure rather than reasons to assume that structure alone guaranteed success.
Advertising became part of a larger brand task
The document emerged from work associated with advertising, but its later significance concerned a wider arrangement for brand activity. P&G’s own innovation history identifies 1931 as a milestone in the creation of brand management (Procter & Gamble, n.d.).
Advertising and brand responsibility should not consequently be treated as identical. An advertisement makes a promise the product must subsequently fulfil. A promotion may create demand that retailers need to serve. Packaging can suggest an experience inconsistent with the copy.
A brand-focused role has to recognise these relationships even when the specialist work remains elsewhere. Its value emerges where separate activities interact. An excellent advertisement cannot indefinitely repair a poor offering; a good product may be misunderstood if communication creates inappropriate expectations. The historical arrangement turned such connections into a continuing responsibility question. This is one reason the memo’s importance exceeds the history of advertising jobs. It concerns the ability of an organisation to treat what the customer encounters as a connected offering rather than a series of unrelated departmental outputs.
Responsibility did not automatically confer authority over every function
A common modern interpretation makes the brand manager an unrestricted chief executive of a small business inside the corporation. The analogy can be illuminating, but it is not a precise description of every arrangement. Responsibility for an outcome and hierarchical authority over every contributor are different things.
A brand manager may depend on manufacturing, research, sales, purchasing and agencies. These functions possess their own expertise and additional obligations. The role therefore needs coordination without assuming that specialist boundaries simply disappear.
Practical questions follow. Who decides when priorities conflict? Who releases money? Where are unresolved disagreements referred? These are matters of organisational design that a title cannot answer. Historically, the underlying principle of brand responsibility should be distinguished from its later implementations. Their differences help explain the system’s adaptability. A company could retain the coordinating idea while altering decision rights and reporting structures. The memo offered an influential reference point, not a universal organisational chart suitable for every industry and stage of growth.
Supporting work was part of the system
The staffing problem itself deserves to remain visible. Additional responsibility requires capacity. If someone is expected to obtain information, organise evidence, develop proposals and monitor implementation, the work must be distributed sensibly.
This insight can disappear when an organisational history is told through one celebrated founder. A system consists not only of the most visible role but also of assistance, observation and dependable routines. Without support, the coordinator may become the bottleneck the arrangement was intended to overcome.
The term brand man also identifies a document from a different working world. A historical account can preserve it as source language without treating it as a timeless occupational ideal. The significance rests on the organisation of work rather than on its gendered vocabulary. Contemporary brand responsibility can draw on the coordinating principle while using different expectations of professional access and collaboration. Recognising the source’s historical language is more accurate than either silently modernising it or presenting its assumptions as inherent requirements of the role.
Internal competition brought benefits and risks
Several brands within one company can serve different needs. A portfolio may reach buyers who would not respond equally to a single offering. At the same time, its brands can compete for customers and for internal resources.
Assigning responsibility to each brand creates attention to its particular development. It may also encourage narrow optimisation when each manager pursues individual results without considering the overall business. A measure can benefit one brand while adding little for the portfolio.
Cannibalisation captures part of the difficulty, but not every transfer of demand is harmful. A company may deliberately move customers from an older offering to an improved one. The more relevant question is whether the movement creates sufficient value for the organisation and its customers to justify the additional cost. Brand-level responsibility cannot replace that broader judgement. It makes a complementary portfolio perspective necessary. Historically, the organisational solution should therefore be seen as creating a useful level of attention, not abolishing the need for higher-level decisions about relationships among products, brands and investments.
One corporation can contain several commercial logics
A frequently purchased household article creates different demands from a specialist offering requiring explanation. Even within a product category, prices, occasions of use and distribution conditions can differ. Common ownership does not remove these distinctions.
Here lies part of the organisational appeal of the system. It gives the specific circumstances of an offering a place to be represented coherently. The alternative is not necessarily incompetent work, but another distribution of the same coordination task across functions.
The choice should consequently fit the actual need. A business with a few closely related products may require a different arrangement from a large consumer-goods portfolio. History does not impose a universal obligation to create a particular job. It reveals why a specific problem favoured a specific solution and why later transfers required adaptation. The more carefully that context is understood, the less tempting it becomes to treat the name of a famous system as sufficient evidence that a contemporary organisation should copy it unchanged.
Diffusion was slower than later fame suggests
Historical scholarship describes the spread of the brand-manager system as gradual. Its expression at P&G did not instantly reorganise marketing departments around the world. Delayed adoption is an important part of critical accounts of the development (Low and Fullerton, 1994).
The pattern is instructive for management ideas generally. An arrangement can appear sensible while requiring difficult changes to established responsibilities. Existing managers must share authority, companies must finance positions and recruits must acquire suitable skills.
Transfer between sectors adds further complications. A model associated with consumer goods needs interpretation before it can serve a different business. Its subsequent reach cannot therefore be explained solely through the persuasive force of the original memorandum. Experience, adjustment and institutional mediation were also required. The distance between initial formulation and widespread use protects the history from a seductive myth: that a well-written proposal transforms an organisation without the labour of implementation. The memo gave a problem a memorable solution, but the system’s career depended on what later organisations actually did with it.
Earlier examples: Wedgwood and the management of trust
Brand building had a long history. In an interview about Nancy F. Koehn’s business histories, Harvard Business School discussed Josiah Wedgwood, H.J. Heinz and Marshall Field. These entrepreneurs developed distinctive offerings and customer trust long before the brand-manager system appeared (Lagace, 2001).
Wedgwood is especially useful for distinguishing practice from later terminology. A business owner did not need the word branding to manage relationships between an article, its reputation and buyers’ expectations. Nor did that activity require a separate employee carrying the title brand manager.
Earlier cases do not disprove McElroy’s importance. They define the scope of the priority claim. He did not discover trust or product differentiation. He proposed a particular organisational answer to managing individual brands inside a larger company. This precision separates an informative history from a founder legend. It also allows different achievements to coexist: entrepreneurial brand building, the professional development of advertising and the institutional assignment of brand responsibility need not share a single date or inventor.
International comparisons: brand knowledge outside P&G
Brand management history did not unfold exclusively inside American consumer-goods corporations. Schwarzkopf’s study of Lever and J. Walter Thompson describes consumer and usage research supporting work on Lux in Britain (Schwarzkopf, 2007).
The comparison does not identify an identical earlier job description. It shows important brand tasks being carried out through another institutional arrangement. A manufacturer, agency and researchers could develop knowledge and alter an offering’s presentation without reproducing the P&G system exactly.
For international history, this is a necessary qualification. Similar tasks can appear in different organisational forms. Asking who was the world’s first brand manager is consequently narrower and harder than asking about early brand work. Without a stable definition and wider archival investigation, a defensible global ranking cannot simply be inferred. The famous memo remains a particularly tangible reference point. It should not become a reason to exclude other trajectories or to assume that all worthwhile brand knowledge required the same reporting structure. Historical comparison is strongest when it examines differences as well as superficial resemblance.
From brand performance to enduring brand equity
Later literature increasingly emphasised that a brand could carry value beyond a single promotional result. David Aaker’s Managing Brand Equity, published in 1991, addressed the development and management of such brand resources (Aaker, 1991).
This partly widened the meaning of responsibility. Managing a brand required more than correcting a current sales problem. Decisions could change expectations and trust over longer periods. A promotion effective immediately might constrain later options or alter how buyers interpreted the offering.
The development did not make organisational responsibility irrelevant. It made the substance of that responsibility more demanding. The coordinating address remained useful, while the range of consequences deserving attention expanded. Retrospectively, however, the mature theory of brand equity should not be read back into the 1931 memorandum as though it were already fully formulated there. Organising responsibility and explaining a brand’s long-term value are related but different intellectual achievements. Their connection belongs to the subsequent history of marketing research and practice rather than to a single original statement.
Keller and the consumer’s perspective
Kevin Lane Keller’s 1993 article presented a model of customer-based brand equity. Its starting point was that knowledge about a brand could influence consumers’ responses to its marketing. Brand value was therefore examined through what buyers knew and how that knowledge affected their reactions (Keller, 1993).
The contrast helps place McElroy historically. His document concerned the organisation of responsibilities. Keller investigated a mechanism through which brands could produce effects in the market. Both belong within brand management, but they operate at different explanatory levels.
Naming a responsible employee does not establish a complete understanding of how customers perceive the brand. Conversely, a sophisticated account of brand associations does not determine who will implement its implications inside the business. Connecting those levels remains a management task. Their histories demonstrate why brand management cannot be reduced either to a job description or to a psychological model. The first gives work an organisational location; the second can improve understanding of what the work is intended to influence. Neither makes the other unnecessary.
Digital environments enlarge the coordination problem
Aimé, Berger-Remy and Laporte characterise the system’s development as adaptive rather than linear. For the digital environment, they emphasise a tension between specialised expertise and the capacity to bring other contributors together (Aimé, Berger-Remy and Laporte, 2018).
That observation can be read as a contemporary version of the original difficulty. More points of contact do not automatically create a more consistent brand. Websites, service, products, retailers and advertising can generate incompatible expectations. Information may multiply while responsibility for connecting it remains unclear.
The answer need not carry the same title everywhere. A brand manager, portfolio leader or cross-functional team can undertake parts of the work. The relevant question is whether someone consistently represents the offering as a whole in actual decisions. This is an analytical application of the historical coordination problem, not a claim that McElroy anticipated platforms or agile digital organisations. Its continuing relevance comes from a recurring organisational difficulty, rather than from treating an old document as a prediction of technologies and professions that developed much later.
What the memo means for product-management history
Product-management histories often refer to McElroy’s document. The connection is understandable because brand responsibility links knowledge of the market with coordinated action. Historically, brand-management and product-management terminology has sometimes appeared in related organisational discussions.
The relationship does not make all later roles identical. A digital product manager may work on technical prioritisation, user behaviour and the continuing development of a service. The brand is then one perspective among several. Conversely, a consumer brand may persist while formulations, packaging and variants change.
The memo can therefore serve as a historical reference point for coordinated responsibility around an offering. It does not establish a complete, uninterrupted genealogy of every modern product role. The more modest conclusion is more useful: different occupations encounter a similar problem of connecting distributed decisions around an offer and its users. Their eventual responsibilities depend on technologies, business models and organisational circumstances that cannot be derived from the 1931 context alone. Recognising a precursor is different from asserting that the later profession existed fully formed within it.
How a brand-management system can disappoint
Fixed responsibility can create clarity while generating new difficulties. A coordinator may receive extensive obligations without sufficient authority or support. The role may stand between functions with conflicting priorities. Performance measures may reward immediate results at the expense of trust or future flexibility.
These possibilities do not establish that the historical P&G arrangement necessarily worked in that way. They follow analytically from the coordination problem. Implementation must clarify how responsibilities, resources and decision rights fit together.
Creating additional positions also does not guarantee better knowledge of buyers. Information can circulate efficiently inside a company while the market remains poorly understood. A brand may be administratively well maintained and commercially misunderstood. The title cannot replace investigation or judgement. The value of the organisational idea depends on the actual work undertaken, not simply on its appearance in a chart. That qualification is consistent with taking the history seriously: an innovation in responsibility makes a task more manageable, but it is not evidence that every organisation adopting the form will perform it successfully.
Why the memorandum’s source status matters
An internal document initially establishes what was proposed or described. It is not a complete record of how quickly every recommendation was implemented or how much profit the arrangement independently produced. This limit applies to the memorandum dated 13 May 1931 as much as to less famous sources.
Corporate retrospectives frequently compress longer developments into memorable milestones. That can be useful for orientation, but it is different from experimental proof of effectiveness. P&G’s dating and later scholarship support the importance of the reference point. They do not explain every subsequent corporate achievement through a single document.
The source distinctions are essential. The memo records an articulation of duties. Historical studies investigate its context, diffusion and transformation. Later management scholarship adds further concepts. Keeping these evidence types separate allows the document to be valued without asking it to perform the work of an entire company history. The result is an account of organisational change grounded in what the sources can establish, rather than a familiar story amplified through repetition.
The company and the author had histories beyond the memo
P&G’s timeline dates Ivory to 1879 and its own consumer research to 1924. Both the established brand and the investigation of buyers consequently preceded the organisational milestone of 1931 (Procter & Gamble, n.d.). The sequence reinforces the distinction between developing market knowledge and assigning responsibility for its use.
The author’s later career requires similar care. The US Department of Defense Historical Office identifies 1948 as the beginning of McElroy’s P&G presidency. He subsequently served as Secretary of Defense under Dwight D. Eisenhower from October 1957 to December 1959 (Office of the Secretary of Defense, n.d.).
Those later offices help explain his public prominence, but they should not be projected backwards. In 1931 he was neither the serving Secretary of Defense nor P&G’s president. The document emerged from an earlier practical role. Attributing his later institutional authority to the original proposal would distort the circumstances in which it was written. Its significance lies in the work it described, not in borrowing prestige from positions he would hold decades later.
What changed in 1931
McElroy expressed an organisational proposition with unusual clarity: a brand needed identifiable responsibility connecting its development with the work of several contributors. The strength of the idea lay in joining continuing attention with an assigned role.
Earlier entrepreneurs had built brands, agencies had developed brand knowledge and researchers had investigated customers. The brand-manager system reorganised such tasks within a particular corporate setting rather than inventing them all. Its later history involved adaptation, diffusion and additional demands.
The memo therefore remains a central milestone in marketing history. It demonstrates that innovation occurs not only in products, media and advertising ideas. Deciding who will remain concerned with an offering, investigate its problems and coordinate responses can also change marketing practice. A staffing argument became an enduringly influential proposal about how a company could organise itself to make its brands more coherently manageable. That is a sufficiently important achievement without making 1931 the beginning of everything brands had previously done.
References
Aaker, D.A. (1991) Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name. New York: Free Press. Publisher’s description available at: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Managing-Brand-Equity/David-A-Aaker/9780029001011 (Accessed: 21 October 2026).
Aimé, I., Berger-Remy, F. and Laporte, M.-E. (2017) ‘A history of the brand management system’, Proceedings of the Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing, pp. 2-16. Available at: https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/pcharm/article/view/1355/1225 (Accessed: 21 October 2026).
Aimé, I., Berger-Remy, F. and Laporte, M.-E. (2018) ‘Lessons from nearly a century of the brand management system’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 10(4), pp. 420-450. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHRM-06-2017-0026.
Keller, K.L. (1993) ‘Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity’, Journal of Marketing, 57(1), pp. 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101.
Lagace, M. (2001) ‘Brand power from Wedgwood to Dell: Part one’. Interview with Nancy F. Koehn. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 16 April. Available at: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/brand-power-from-wedgwood-to-dell-part-one (Accessed: 21 October 2026).
Low, G.S. and Fullerton, R.A. (1994) ‘Brands, brand management, and the brand manager system: A critical-historical evaluation’, Journal of Marketing Research, 31(2), pp. 173-190. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379403100203.
McElroy, N.H. (1931) Internal memorandum on duties and responsibilities of brand personnel, 13 May. Procter & Gamble. Three-page reproduction available at: https://www.bringthedonuts.com/media/neil-mcelroy-brand-memo-1931.pdf (Accessed: 21 October 2026).
Office of the Secretary of Defense (n.d.) ‘Neil H. McElroy’. Historical Office. Available at: https://history.defense.gov/Multimedia/Biographies/Article-View/Article/571269/neil-h-mcelroy/ (Accessed: 21 October 2026).
Procter & Gamble (n.d.) ‘Innovation’. Available at: https://us.pg.com/innovation/ (Accessed: 21 October 2026).
Schwarzkopf, S. (2007) ‘Consumer voice and brand loyalty: Lever, J. Walter Thompson and the rise of market research in Britain, 1918-1939’, Proceedings of the Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing, pp. 180-192. Available at: https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/pcharm/article/view/1583/1427 (Accessed: 21 October 2026).
