Going where work is has Wypall reaping rewards

Every Sprint Cup Series race has a bevy of award winners that have nothing to do with who crossed the finish line first. They're usually in the official results.

One of those programs, the Wypall Wipers Crew Chief of the Race Award, is really "cleaning up" for Wypall Wipers, a product manufactured by Kimberly-Clark Professional.

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The Wypall Wipers Crew Chief of the Race program is a season-long contest to determine the best crew chiefs in the Sprint Cup garage. After each race, a panel votes to determine which crew chief exhibited the most outstanding strategy and leadership.

The panel, which includes former crew chief and SPEED/FOX television analyst Jeff Hammond and current crew chiefs Todd Berrier, Bob Osborne and Kenny Francis, makes its decision and the winner is awarded $1,000. The winner of the season-long competition earns $20,000 at the season-ending Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Now, the Wypall brand isn't giving money to the crew chiefs just because they're good guys. They're doing it to increase brand awareness, just like every other sponsor in NASCAR.

"We've been doing our NASCAR program for four years, our Wypall Wipers Crew Chief program, and we started it for very similar reasons that a lot of companies do -- to increase our brand awareness," said Tom Merrill, Wypall Wipers category manager for Kimberly-Clark Professional. "We did a lot of research around our brand and what were some things we could do to increase our brand awareness. Our Wypall Wipers products are disposable rag and shop towel replacement products that are used in manufacturing by, most consistently, a lot of blue-collar workers. We wanted to find an image via a marketing program that matched that target customer and really connected with them."

"That's how we came up with the idea to get involved with the crew chiefs. They are the guys behind the scenes that do the hard work, and a lot more of them are getting credit on the national scene. We like to think a lot of that is due to the program we put in place."

Being behind the crew chiefs, who get less glory than the drivers who pilot the cars they build and service, fits the Wypall brand philosophy, which is to go where the work is being done.

"We believe that benefit [of being where the work is done] has really been able to drive through the Wypall brand name with that blue-collar customer," Merrill said. "We've done a lot of activities, sampling and advertising over the past few years to get people familiar with the brand. We've definitely seen a lift in excitement in the program and the products. We've had lots of people come back to the races that use our wipers at work, and for them to see what we are doing with the crew chiefs makes them proud to use our wipers."

Even though Wypall Wipers is a division of Kimberly-Clark, it's not like the budget is unlimited. Nobody's is these days. That means Merrill and Larry Nedrow, director of Kimberly-Clark's Professional Wiper Business, have to be creative to move the brand forward.

"There's a lot of stuff we would wish for sure, like a Wypall car, a race entitlement, and we've talked a lot this year about where we want to take the program," Merrill said. "But we've already gotten a lot of really great customers from this work and forged some really strong relationships with them, and we continue to find ways that we can leverage and build upon those moving forward. The program we are running works.

"Most of the products we sell are in the B2B arena, a business-to-business relationship. You can't walk into Wal-Mart on a Monday after a race and buy a box of Wypall Wipers; it just doesn't work that way. Companies want the products delivered to them for use at their facilities. One of our continuing initiatives moving forward is how to grow those B2B relationships, not only from a customer retention standpoint, but how do we continue to make relationships at the track that get us involved with other big companies and organizations that could potentially use our products and gain momentum that way. We'll be concentrating over the next year to two years on how to leverage that."

One way that is being done is by hosting the Wypall Wipers Bristol Track Tours, which is in its second year of existence. The event is set for Saturday, Aug. 23, at Bristol Motor Speedway as part of the annual Sharpie 500 weekend.

"Each time we try to make it a little better," Merrill said. "A lot of the people that come to the races and do the track tour are hospitality or suite guests who are typically B2B-type businesses invited by someone they have a business relationship with, and that gets us back to the kind of customer that we are looking for at the track."

With 10,000 such fans in the March of each year and 15,000 or so in August, that's a target-rich environment.

There will be interactive games, a tire-changing booth and much more at the track tour, executed by Motorsports Agency of record for Wypall Wipers, Pro Sports Management and Marketing of Charlotte, N.C. The fans who attend get to be right on the track, in the pits and garage and right up close to where it all happens. Hammond and the crew chiefs will be on hand to sign autographs and interact with the fans.

"You have the ability to lead your customer right down to the pits to see what normal people don't get to see," Merrill said. "The idea is to provide exclusive activities that you can't buy a ticket to. You have to know somebody to get there, and we hope that connection is, 'Well, we knew Wypall Wipers and they were able to get us there.'"

Nedrow, like Merrill, says the program is working, and for a brand like Wypall Wipers, that's the best news of all.

"We look at our return on investment, and we did a study last year with Georgia State at Bristol trying to understand and validate whether our proposition is getting heard? It's creating awareness that Tom referred to, yes, which is great, but will they actually buy? Can you convert that awareness to a purchase?

"Based on the survey we conducted, indeed there are a substantial number of people that will purchase, whether they're actually using it or making the decision for the facility, we're hitting the mark."

Nedrow said that one of the uses of the track tour is to provide executives an up-close look at what Wypall Wipers offers in hopes of affecting purchasing decisions.

"We generally focus on the user of course, but the decision-makers are there as well; there's a whole level of NASCAR that is in the suites, the executives," Nedrow said. "Our focus clearly is where the work is done, and Wypall Wipers is a tool they can use every day. But our important business question is 'who's making that decision?' Sometimes it's those folks up in the suites. We feel like we can cross all functions of anyone who is at a race."

That, in a nutshell, is all a sponsor asks for when playing in the deep, deep ocean that is NASCAR sponsorship.