DuPont-NASCAR Marketing

In 1992 Joe Jackson, former manager of DuPont Motorsports for twelve years, was angling to get the paint business at Rick Hendrick's sixty-five automotive dealerships across the United States. In order to win the Hendrick car dealership paint contract, Jackson and Hendrick met to discuss the possibility of sponsoring Hendrick's new team and rookie NASCAR driver—Jeff Gordon. As a result of that meeting, DuPont signed on to be the primary sponsor. By 2006 Gordon was a NASCAR superstar, and the DuPont logo—viewed by millions—was a household brand. While this level of exposure was exciting for the company, executives at DuPont could not help but wonder if they were fully leveraging this tremendous marketing opportunity. Gordon was on fire—but was DuPont maximizing the heat? The DuPont-NASCAR case tasks students and executives with designing a creative marketing campaign to activate the NASCAR sponsorship opportunity and maximize value beyond conventional sponsorship marketing. This open-ended challenge encourages students and executives to think outside of the traditional marketing tactics typically employed by business-to-consumer (B2C) NASCAR sponsors. Additionally, the nature of DuPont creates the need to develop a multi-dimensional plan that caters to a breadth of brands. Beyond designing a new marketing campaign, a key objective of the case is to focus students and executives on designing metrics for measurement of the return on investment (ROI) into a campaign plan. As a first step, it is important to clearly articulate the campaign, business strategy, and key business objectives mapped to the strategy.Students and executives learn how to design a marketing campaign for measurement. Specifically, they are tasked with designing a new marketing campaign for DuPont to activate the DuPont/NASCAR relationship. Students and executives must define metrics for measurement and learn to use a balanced score card approach. Since the DuPont sponsorship of Hendrick Motorsports is a brand campaign built to reach the DuPont business-to-business (B2B) customer, both non-financial and financial metrics are used. The key to success is to have a clearly defined sponsorship marketing strategy and business objectives. The case teaches students and executives how to define key metrics and articulate a methodology for campaign measurement pre and post to quantify the return on investment (ROI).