Steve Phelps, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for NASCAR, oversees the integrated marketing communications, corporate marketing, brand/consumer marketing, licensing, business development and NASCAR’s digital and social media efforts. He recalls how NASCAR took advertising opportunities to unprecedented levels.
If you look at the evolution of NASCAR sponsorships, from endemic companies and products in the beginning to technology companies and green industries today, NASCAR has continued to deliver a return on investment.
The entitlement of NASCAR’s top series from a Winston perspective to Nextel and on to Sprint, and even with Busch and Nationwide and Craftsman and Camping World, are an important part of NASCAR sponsorship, but you have to go back even further to the early sponsorships of NASCAR.
They represented things that were endemic to the sport — local gas stations, used-car lots, car dealerships and auto parts. Those things kind of built the foundation for sponsorship of NASCAR.
The advent of series-entitlement sponsorships was something that changed the face of sponsorship in NASCAR. Winston and R.J. Reynolds were a big part of marketing the sport, as are their successors. In the 1980s, household brands and packaged-goods and beverage companies came into the sport and were very important to the early success of sponsorship in this sport.
You had brands like Miller, Coors, Folgers coffee, Tide, all kinds of companies that were affiliated with NASCAR from a sponsorship standpoint, initially for visibility but ultimately it was about building brands and moving product.
Then in the 1990s, companies like McDonald’s, Home Depot and Lowe’s came onto the scene, as well, because they saw NASCAR as an opportunity to connect with the most loyal fan base in sports.
The biggest difference in NASCAR versus stick-and-ball sports is our fans understand the need for sponsorship, and they will actually go out and purchase those products and services that are on those cars or affiliated with NASCAR the sanctioning body because they know those companies are truly what makes this sport go. And that’s where I think there’s some confusion around what sponsorship does in other sports. Does it get me a shortstop or a long-snapper?
I do know in NASCAR that if Lowe’s sponsors my favorite driver, Jimmie Johnson, I’m going to go to Lowe’s and support Lowe’s because I know Lowe’s is putting Jimmie Johnson in that race car and on that race track.
That’s a very, very important point of differentiation relative to other sports.
We’re very fortunate to have one out of five Fortune 500 companies invested in NASCAR. That’s an extraordinary number, far more than any other sport, and they do it because it works.
They do it because NASCAR is the place for business, not because the CEO likes NASCAR, but because it moves their business.
