Why Sponsor NASCAR?

I'm going to write about NASCAR and marketing, if you don't care about either of those things, you can quit reading now. I'm writing this for three reasons:

1. I'm a big NASCAR fan (it's more than just going around in circles, I'm happy to explain it sometime)
2. I spent some time working with a NASCAR team and learned a lot about how the business side of the sport operates
3. The New York Times had a story yesterday about how the NBA can learn something from NASCAR in regards to it's thought about adding sponsors to jerseys. This article almost entirely missed the real point of NASCAR sponsorships. (I can't say I find this shocking as NASCAR is hardly the number one beat for the Times.)

For some reason the article focused on how sponsors can affect the behavior of the athletes. This is sort of interesting, but pretty far from the real story of NASCAR sponsorships. While the business of NASCAR is struggling for a bunch of reasons (financial meltdown, arms race in technology raising the cost of fielding competitive teams, more competition than ever for ad dollars), what makes it work has not changed. When a brand buys into a NASCAR sponsorship (which goes for ~$20 million for a full season), they are buying two big things: Loyalty and activation opportunities. Let's start with loyalty. This is what the article really misses. When brands sponsor NASCAR they get a real understanding from the fans that they are responsible for the car on the track. The drivers get it, the teams get and the fans get it. This is hugely different from slapping your logo on something (whether it's soccer where it's displayed in giant form on the player's belly or basketball, where they seem to be thinking about some little sponsorship patch). People in those sports think the sponsor is responsible for the team in the same way no one will ever walk into a Brooklyn Nets game and say "thank you Barclays for making this possible." The numbers in NASCAR back this up. I used to have them, but the league and teams generally trot around a number of 80%+ loyalty of a fan to its driver's sponsor. If Jimmie Johnson is your guy you go to Lowe's not Home Depot. That's just how it works. Okay, onto activation. Take a look at the official sponsors of NASCAR teams and you see a few different kinds of companies: Car-related companies (NAPA, Shell, Mobil 1), CPG (Budweiser, Mars, Miller Lite) and a lot of retail/franchise businesses (Burger King, Target, GEICO, Farmers Insurance, Home Depot, Lowes, Office Depot). The first set is obvious, the average NASCAR fan likes cars and car-related stuff. The second is about audience as NASCAR skews heavily male and sometimes guys are hard to reach. The last, though, is the most interesting to me. What all these companies have in common is lots of employees (you could throw FedEx in this group too and UPS was a long-time sponsor of the sport). One of the more interesting things about how brands actually utilize their sponsorship is that they do fully integrated program where they use a sponsorship to reach not just consumers, but also employees. Target, Home Depot and Lowes have 900,000 combined employees (365, 331 and 204). That's a lot of people to keep happy. One of the ways they do it is give them something to root for. It's not shocking, or even all that interesting, it just sort of makes sense and means that the investment is offset into a few different departments. Anyway, I don't have a real conclusion to all this, just felt like writing a little bit about what I know about NASCAR. Hopefully it was relatively interesting.