By Ron Lemasters Jr., Special to Turner Sports Interactive July 7, 2004

If you are a company and you want some serious bang for your marketing buck, where do you go? Sure, the NFL is the biggest game in town, and major-league baseball is the nominal "national pastime," but what does your money get you? Provided your company isn't Budweiser, Miller or American Express, you're likely going to get lost in the shuffle, and even if you are one of those companies, you're still sharing time with the rest of the marketplace.

Increasingly, companies are finding that NASCAR has the reach, the powerful fan base and the ability to provide a stable marketing platform for any variety of products from laundry soap to home improvement to food.

Why do companies like Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing and Proctor & Gamble choose NASCAR? "The number one reason why is that their research shows that a NASCAR fan is the most loyal fan in all of sports, whether it be NFL, NBA, baseball, hockey, what have you," said one NASCAR insider familiar with corporate structure and motorsports. "In NASCAR, you have loyalty not only to the driver, but to the companies that make the sport work. In other forms of professional sport, the fan supports the player or the team. You have an added dimension in NASCAR.

"Taking that a step further, most of the sponsors in NASCAR can take that sponsorship and communicate directly to their consumer, where that consumer happens to spend their money, whether it be at a hardware retailer, a rental furniture outlet or an automotive dealer. Those fans tend to support the sport that they love, in an individual way rather than as a team."
There is also a wider field of endeavor in NASCAR than in other sports.

"We feel that NASCAR provides a much more integrated opportunity than other sports," said Eric Pinkham, director of corporate event marketing for Newell Rubbermaid, sponsor of the No. 97 Fords driven by Kurt Busch. "In addition to the valuable on-air exposure the sport provides, NASCAR also lends itself well to the grass-roots marketing efforts that we at Newell Rubbermaid feel are critical to our brand-building efforts. Our race team allows us to take advantage of television, radio, print, and Internet, in terms of exposure and publicity, but it also provides us with a show car program, which we use to leverage our sponsorship year-round."

Increasingly, companies are finding that NASCAR has the reach, the powerful fan base and the ability to provide a stable marketing platform for any variety of products from laundry soap to home improvement to food.