Men's professional tennis has a brand new look in 2009 after the biggest changes to its tour in the ATP's 20-year history, including a new tour structure and major investment in stadia and marketing. The tour's first marketing executive, Phil Anderton, is tasked with getting the new message across.

Although international tennis coverage is dominated by the four Grand Slam events each year, the men's professional tennis tour, which has existed in its current form for nearly 20 years, remains the primary focus for the world's top players on a week-to-week basis. Most people are aware of the tour, which is organised and staged by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), but until this year there was no clear, consolidated packaging of the season by the governing body.

That has changed in 2009. There has been a complete overhaul of how the tour works - and how it is marketed. The ATP re-branded its tour as the ATP World Tour, made clear which events matter most and stepped up its own, centrally-driven, marketing campaign. The changes are complemented by around US$800 million of capital investment being put into the development of new venues and facilities.

Helpfully for the ATP, the revamp coincided with the beginning of the most competitive and exciting tennis season for a generation. There were four genuine contenders for the world number one position, recently reclaimed by Roger Federer from Spaniard Rafael Nadal, with Serbian Novak Djokovic and Britain's Andy Murray also impressing at the top of the rankings.

The driving force behind the changes was Etienne de Villiers, executive chairman of the ATP between 2005 and 2008. The South African, not always a popular leader of the organisation, had his own background in marketing and was the first to realise that what the ATP and its tour – which was relatively successful, but hardly flourishing – required more than anything was a clear marketing strategy.

De Villiers set about installing the ATP's first dedicated chief marketing officer: Scotsman Phil Anderton, who took on the role in 2006. Anderton was an obvious choice. He had recently left Scottish soccer club Heart of Midlothian, where he had spent a brief stint as chief executive, and had previously headed up the marketing department at the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU). Before that, he had made his name working for Proctor and Gamble and Coca-Cola.

On his arrival at the organisation, Anderton realised he had to start at the beginning and effectively develop a marketing strategy from scratch. He says, reflecting on those early days: "The first proposition was 'what was our brand? What is it we're actually selling?' A lot of people when I joined said 'well, we're selling tennis'. But tennis is way too generic. What we're selling is a particular slice of tennis, the premium end of tennis – the men's professional game. When it came to the branding we looked at how we currently brand our tour. What we saw was a very fragmented picture: we had the ATP as the tour body then the different categories of tournaments – Masters Series, Tennis Masters Cup, International Series. We looked at that and decided it was confusing. People didn't understand what it is that they are selling to me."

He adds: "I put in place the fundamentals, the key elements of our marketing approach. Develop a strong proposition; enhance the product that will deliver against that proposition; drive awareness of that proposition against the right target audience; and then ensure that we deliver value when people actually do try the product." If it sounds like marketing-speak, Anderton makes no apology for it: it was exactly what the ATP required.

The first task was to undertake extensive consumer research. Anderton is immediately keen to point out that it wasn't "opinion-led views of people within tennis" but, instead, "speaking to the tennis fan and people who were very superficially involved in tennis and asking them what were their views of our tour".

He explains: "The first fundamental thing was 'who is your target audience?' A lot of people when I first joined said that we had to attract a completely new audience. That for me is the classic mistake of marketing – that you've got to go for new people. The real opportunity in marketing is to go for the people who already use your product and try to get them to use more of that product, more frequently."

"When we looked at the data what we saw is that we have millions of people involved with our product; it was just that they weren't consuming it that often. If you look at television coverage, for example, in the top 20 markets 75 per cent of the people who were watching are watching Grand Slams. The obvious thing to do was go after those very same people and ask them why they weren't engaging in Nadal against Federer, the very same players that they watched in the Grand Slams, when they're in Monte Carlo, Miami, California or Rome?"

Using independent research companies, notably London-based Brand Driver, over 20,000 tennis fans at various levels of interest were surveyed. The results were as stark as they were surprising. According to Anderton "there was real confusion", even amongst existing fans. He adds: "What we got back was very clear that fans just didn't understand the tour. Over 60 per cent were what we called the 'like-tennis' fans – people who, like me before I joined the ATP, who would maybe watch a Grand Slam but underneath that didn't really understand what was going on."

It was a serious wake-up call for the ATP and its members. "Certainly within the tour, if you speak to tournament directors and people who had been in the game for a long time, that was a big surprise – because I was a consumer and I didn't really understand what was happening. Frankly when you look at the way we were presenting the tour to fans when they went to events or watching on television or websites, it's not a surprise that they didn't understand what was going on. It was a fragmented approach: individual brands, sponsor-driven brands and brands that would change year-to-year and nothing that would thread the individual product brands together."

The confusion amongst the consumers reflected the fact that the ATP had never even previously considered marketing the tour centrally. "It's been very much a case that a tournament will put on an event; our players turn up at those events hoping that people will come across and enjoy them. It was left to individual tournaments; nobody really thought about our product as a brand, thinking about who our target audience should be, what the proposition is to encourage them to come along, what we need to do to drive up the awareness, how do we ensure that we deliver a good experience for people."

Once it had been established that there was widespread confusion about the tour, Anderton and his colleagues began the long process of better explaining how it worked and why it was important, especially as it had become abundantly clear that its muddled nature was preventing the tour from growing further.