Drivers like Kasey Kahne have carried Unilever's brands on their Busch Series cars all season. Credit: Autostock

Unilever getting plenty of bang for NASCAR buck

Ultimately, NASCAR is all about competition, both on the track and in the midway area outside the track, where all the business of marketing is done on a near one-to-one basis.

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Unilever, which is better known by brands such as Country Crock, Hellmann's, Lipton and Q-Tips, is all about winning both battles, as is evidenced by the Ultimate Chargers program the company has run this season in the Busch Series.

Nancy Davis, Manager of Building Brands for Customers, Southeast Division, is the de facto head of the NASCAR program for Unilever, and her involvement began as sort of an exercise in research.

"My vice president called me one day and said that he was getting a lot of inquiries about NASCAR," she said. "So I did a white paper on it, did the proposal and sold it into my management. When it was done, he said, 'you get to manage it.' I had to become very educated very quickly."

Apparently, that education was top-notch. Unilever's Ultimate Chargers program is generating an astounding 5:1 return on investment. That means the company is realizing five dollars for every dollar it puts into the program.

That is serious business, even for one of the world's largest consumer products companies.

We all know that companies do not invest millions of dollars in NASCAR just because the cars look cool and they go fast. Unilever is no different.

"The biggest thing is the return on investment," Davis said. "Any time we do a program, we want to make sure we get one. Years ago, you were looking for 2:1. With this program, we're up to 4:1 and even 5:1.

"Bottom line on this is, yes, we want to connect with the consumer but we want to sell volume," she said. "We want to sell more mayonnaise, we want to sell more pasta, we want to sell more detergent. That's the barometer and the benchmark."

Davis uses a couple of yardsticks for this measurement.

"We take a look at what we call marketing components," she said. "We take a look at Joyce Julius (which measures the amount of clear, in-focus exposure each brand receives and assigns a value to it), and recently we engaged in Nielsen Fan Links, which NASCAR corporate worked with Nielsen on. We're getting a feel from a marketing and an exposure perspective. Bottom line, too, is sales. Am I able to get incremental volume from a customer that I would not have gotten had I not been in NASCAR?"

Davis said that Nielsen is the sales volume is measured in two ways: by the Nielsen numbers and by factory shipment. "The most important is Nielsen, because that's the consumer pull," she said. "You really want the pull through on that."

The first thing Davis realized, as a result of her research and subsequent white paper, was that marketing, not motors, came first.

"We did it [the NASCAR program] backwards," she said. "The race team is core and important, but we knew if we didn't have our marketing program set, the return would never happen, so we built the activation program first."

An activation program consists of at-track displays, mobile marketing, complete with sampling programs and follow-through.

Then, Unilever chose the venues. "We knew that some of the key tracks on the circuit were important too," she said. "We were at Charlotte in the spring and next year we'll be here for both races. There's Daytona, Richmond, Talladega and Atlanta. Our goal for next year is to move a little further to the Midwest and maybe Las Vegas."

Activation requires fans, and Davis was a bit puzzled as to why CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies weren't taking advantage of the low-hanging fruit at-track.

"There are a lot of CPG companies in this sport, but they weren't leveraging the consumer at the track," she explained. "They're [race fans] sitting ducks. They get here early, they're looking to be entertained, they're looking to be educated and it's a captive audience."

The second piece was to develop programs at retail, which involve packaging and the display units that go with them. Wal-Mart, Dollar General and Target are primary destinations, along with drug chains. The final piece of the puzzle was media and PR to support the program.

Once all that was complete, Unilever got around to choosing the race team it wanted to make the program go.

"Evernham Racing is a very professional organization, and that means a lot to us when we're working with sponsorships or properties," Davis said. "Their personnel, both the drivers and the internal employees we have worked with, are just top-notch.

"We're a very conservative company, and I have to make sure that I have a driver and a representative that is of outstanding quality and stature. When we look at drivers, it's not only ability and aptitude but it's also personality and how they're going to conduct themselves."

The products that Unilever is featuring on Evernham Motorsports' Busch Series car this season -- Hellmann's, Wisk detergent, Ragu pasta sauce, Lipton Tea, Lawry's spice blends and marinades, Snuggle fabric softener, Shedd's Spread Country Crock chilled sides, Wish-Bone salad dressings and Slim-Fast weight control products -- are designed to have broad appeal but all have a distinct gender-neutral quality.

"One of the main reasons we do NASCAR is because in addition to reaching consumers, they are gender neutral," she said. "Many of our products, core products, appeal to women 25-40 with families. You're getting a lot of young children, and that's key, if you can get them early, not only with your product but with the sponsorship as well."

Davis stays in close contact with each of the nine brands.

"We stay close with our brands and each year we sit down and review," she said. "One of the brands we had this year, Snuggle, has decided to move to the retail side, and next year we're bringing in Klondike ice cream.

"We've been able to cater to the brands, really."

It's still a numbers game, and the 5:1 return on investment continues to be the Rosetta Stone for Unilever.

"I can never go down," Davis said with a chuckle. "That's the benchmark we have to keep to. As long as we're moving that incremental volume, we'll be in the sport."