Word: gordons
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When Jeff Gordon won the Coca-Cola 600 last month, he celebrated with a liter of Pepsi, his new soft-drink sponsor. It was only fair. He won the Pepsi 400 while representing Coke. The two cola giants went wheel to wheel to roll up Gordon's endorsement, one measure of the man's crossover status as a national marketing icon. With two Winston Cup stock-car championships in the past three seasons, the California-born, Indiana-honed speed merchant is one of the hottest athletes in an even hotter sport...
Along with winning his second straight Coca-Cola 600, which now rivals the previously unassailable Indy 500 for attention, Gordon is not only driving himself into a broader marketplace, but he is also taking NASCAR with him. They are like drafting partners, the racing strategy in which two cars driving bumper to bumper together can go faster than either individually. In the 50 years since NASCAR, the popular acronym for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, crawled from the beaches of Daytona, Fla., and dirt tracks of the Southeast, it has evolved into a national draw...
...recent survey, Burns asked advertising creative directors and corporate marketing executives which athletes they would most desire to pitch their wares. Gordon trailed only basketball deity Michael Jordan and golfers Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer. "Gordon came at the perfect time," notes Charlotte, N.C., Motor Speedway president Humpy Wheeler, "very similar to the mid-'50s for the PGA, when TV finally figured out how to televise a match and Arnold Palmer was sitting right there. Boom, it was all they needed...
Pepsi, a longtime NASCAR sponsor, has in fact redirected its race against Coke by hitching its wagon to Gordon, hoping it can emulate his ability to win coming from behind. "They said all the right things," notes Gordon of the Pepsi switch. "They've really got behind me and done exactly what they said they were going to do." After ceding its "official soft drink of NASCAR" status to Coke this year, the company has essentially said, We'll take Gordon, you take the rest. "He's an exciting new-generation athlete who matches up with Pepsi's personality," effuses...
...Gordon, together with his beauty-queen wife Brooke, is featured on packages of Close-Up toothpaste. Once a top seller in the '70s, the Chesebrough-Pond's brand is using Gordon and his wife to retool the product. With their faces on 3.5 million collectible packages and 25,000 store displays, the company says it has gained record market share."It's been phenomenal," says Nancy Heller, brand manager for Close-Up. "We thought it was going to be a regional program, and to our surprise, we were able to do this nationally...