Sarah Robb O’Hagan is a Kiwi, but Forbes magazine considers her one of the US’s most powerful women in sports as president of Gatorade North America and global chief marketing officer for sports nutrition at Pepsico. Robb O’Hagan joined the FMCG giant as Gatorade’s chief marketing officer in 2008, overseeing that brand’s transformation from a sports drink company to a ‘sports performance innovator’ with the launch of the likes of the G Series line of exercise drinks. Engaging with athletes through social media has been driving that transformation and it’s a trend she cites as the most exciting innovation in marketing right now — and one Kiwis must keep up with.

Robb O’Hagan began her stellar marketing career on Air New Zealand’s graduate programme, later heading for the bright lights of LA at 23 to work at the airline’s office there. She moved on to Virgin Atlantic, audaciously — and successfully — pitching to Sir Richard Branson the idea of renaming the airline ‘Virgin Shaglantic’ in conjunction with the release of the Austin Powers film, before moving to Virgin Megastores just as the attack of MP3s began. She calls her next shift — to computer gaming giant Atari — “the biggest disaster of my career”, but it taught her a valuable lesson about following her passions. You get the sense the fitness junkie found her home when she moved on to Nike, where she spent six years.

She was headhunted by Gatorade, the US’s second-biggest sports brand, at the most inopportune of times — when pregnant with her third child — “but I knew if I didn’t take it I was going to be really mad”. Backstage at the recent World Class New Zealand ‘Inspire Auckland’ event — which showcased seven of the country’s leading global business thinkers — she talked about the hard yards required to transform the Gatorade brand in the midst of a recession. She’s been pleasantly surprised, however, at just how quickly the brand has rebuilt. “If you go back to your core and do it really well,” she says, “the consumer responds.”

What can New Zealand companies do to better access US markets?
We have to get ahead of the game quickly on social media. I think everyone is on Facebook, but I was speaking at an advertising conference the other day and I was surprised that only three people in the room were tweeting. Wherever I speak I’m used to everyone, everywhere doing it. It’s a significant trend and shift. We’re a US$5 billion business, but we have really, really spent time on who exactly in the blogosphere influences the end consumer that we go after. It’s not enough just to say ‘Charlie Sheen’s got 2 million followers’. I don’t really care. We want to know who’s the person who’s actually going to influence the high school quarterback on what he’s going to put in his body when he’s working out. It takes a lot of time and discipline to understand and track who’s having dialogue out there.

So how do comparatively small companies in New Zealand gain those insights?
Someone tweeted back to me when I was speaking the other day and said, ‘Oh it’s easy for you to say, you’re a big company’. But I actually think it’s the opposite in some respects because when you’re in a big company, for someone like me, I’m trying to keep a $5 billion business on track; I don’t have the time on a daily basis to be way down in the niche trenches of what’s going on with, say, the cycling community. It’s actually easy for those companies with very little resource to figure out how to communicate with their little flash mob of passionate enthusiasts. Because we’re a big business that is built for scale it was really hard internally to convince everyone that we need to start acting like a little guy; that we’ve got to invest in some real people being out there and representing our brand on the web.

So it’s about authenticity?
Absolutely. And I think that’s what New Zealand businesses can do really, really well because we are nimble. New Zealand wants to do business with China, but China is a billion people. We really only need to do business with 1% of them to make a difference, so who are the 1% that count? That’s where you can really gain understanding through social media because you can see people’s behaviour, you can see what they’re talking about and start to understand who’s got an emotional connection to what you’re doing. We had a very interesting experience early on when we were really trying to transform our engagement approach. We really learned to stop focusing on the glitzy content, but go back to the block and tackle — that’s an American football saying for going back to the basics — and making sure you’re first identifying the core consumer that you want to go after, then communicating with them in a relevant way. It’s not so much shoving our message in their faces; it’s more about when they ask the question, we’ll be there to answer it. I think the consumer really, really responds if you hold yourself true and not really overcommercialise it.

Are there common mistakes or misconceptions you see New Zealand companies make when going into the US market?
I think, again, we tend to go, ‘It’s 300 million people so let’s have at it’, as opposed to really understanding that a thoughtful effort placed in the right little geographic place in the US can have so much more impact. We have this saying at work that we use: ‘You are where you sell’. When I was at Nike I think people would be shocked to learn how much we would spend on what we called ‘city attack plans’ in the cities that we knew were really influential for our brand because we knew you can’t be all things to all people.