Sponsorships benefit teams, sponsors and fans
By Richard Petty, Special to Turner Sports Interactive
November 20, 2001
10:32 AM EST (1532 GMT)
As I was eating my Cheerios the other morning and Lynda was finishing up some Bisquick biscuits, I was looking through the paper, seeing what was on TNT that night. I love drama, you know, and a movie and a bag of Pop Secret Microwave Popcorn is a pretty good way to spend an evening.
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Richard Petty
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Breakfast over, I pulled on my Red Wing Shoes -- the limited edition Richard Petty boots, of course -- grabbed a handful of Advocare vitamins and pulled out my Sprint PCS to make a call. Lynda washed her hands with Pacific Garden, dried them on Sparkle paper towels, and watched as the water went down the drain through Ferguson plumbing equipment.
I made my call to Freightliner, which makes the transporters we use to haul our Sprint, Georgia-Pacific and Cheerios/Betty Crocker teams, then stuck a couple of Fruit Roll-Ups in my pocket for later. They are always good with a Coca-Cola. I climbed in my Dodge and headed on out.
I wanted to get my Polaris Sportsman 700 Twin ATV ready. It's a great way to escape the every day pressures, and find "The Way Out" to the great outdoors, especially when we're riding with the grand kids on their Polaris Youth ATVs. We keep up with each other thanks to our Racing Radios. As well as they work at the track, they work pretty well if we get separated on the farm too.
Once we come in, the grand kids usually want to pull out their Hot Wheels cars and play. Yeah, ol' Granddad gets down in the floor and "races" with them too. Seems I used to win a lot more in the big cars than I do with these Hot Wheels ones.
You might be getting the picture by now.
Sponsors are pretty important to our business. Obviously, we need them on the quarter panels and hoods of the cars. They are our base for the finances of racing. I don't know of a single team out there that can run without one. Every year you hear about one guy or another who says he will run the whole season whether he finds a sponsor or not. Well, they hardly ever make it through the whole season.
At Petty Enterprises, it goes further than that. Our sponsors are more than just the words we put on the car. They are our partners. They are part of the Petty Enterprises family. I just don't know of another way to do business.
Sure, the money is important but the "fit" can be even more important a lot of times. We want sponsors who fit Petty Enterprises, and we want to make sure Petty Enterprises fits the sponsors. It goes one step further, though. We want sponsors who fit each other, who can work together.
I'm not a marketing guy but it's incredible to see these things come together. Last year, General Mills and Mattel collaborated, putting together what they call a "cross-promotion." If you remember when you were a kid diving inside a box of Lucky Charms to see what the prize was inside, then you can appreciate this. Specially-marked boxes of Cheerios had a Hot Wheels diecast car inside. Of course, they were all Dodges and involved all three of the Petty Enterprises cars and those sponsors too -- Sprint, Georgia-Pacific and Cheerios.
Good deal for everybody involved. But you know who won in the long run? The lady who bought the Cheerios and took it home to a pretty excited kid.
Sponsorship is important to our sport and to all of the teams involved. But it's situations like that, those "cross-promotions," that really hit home as to how important they are to our sponsors too.
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