winningest driver in Busch Series history, helping the
grocery store chain maximize its sponsorship.When members from the founding family of the Winn-Dixie grocery chain approached their vice president of advertising about sponsoring a stock car 10 years ago, his response was less than enthusiastic.
"I wasn't a race fan and I'd never been to a race in my life," said Mickey Clerc, who is now vice president of public relations for Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. "I had serious questions about us investing money into that. I questioned the wisdom of even looking at it."
Tyne Davis, who was one of the chain's founders, and Dano Davis, who is now Winn-Dixie's chairman, wouldn't relent. So Clerc and several other top Winn-Dixie executives went to the 1991 Winston Cup season finale in Atlanta, where they watched Mark win the race.
As the crowd was leaving, the Winn-Dixie brass listened to a pitch from Roush Racing, which was seeking a sponsor for Mark in NASCAR's second tier, the Busch Series. By day's end, Winn-Dixie was in racing with Clerc, initially a skeptic, tapped to manage the sponsorship.
A decade later, Winn-Dixie is out of racing - at least as a primary sponsor. But the company used that sponsorship with much savvy and success from 1993 to 2000.
Thanks in large part to Winn-Dixie's willingness to back Mark with better funding than other Busch series teams, he won 38 races in eight seasons while teamed with the grocer. No other driver has won more than 31 Busch races.
"It couldn't get any better for us," Clerc said. "It was magic. It was just one of those things that come up once in a lifetime and we just happened to be there."
Winn-Dixie, which operates more than 1,000 stores across 14 Southeastern states, used Mark in its advertising and to promote its in-store brands, including Chek Cola, Astor Iced Tea, its coffee and breakfast cereal brands and assorted other products that might appeal to NASCAR tailgaters.
While individual, higher-profile labels like Pepsi and Coke spent heavily for endorsements from other marquee drivers, Winn-Dixie was able to connect Mark with its line of low-priced brands. The strategy, Clerc said, was to build a connection between the store and NASCAR's loyal fans. It wasn't meant to sell Chek Cola as much as to drive traffic through the doors.
"I couldn't say the sales of any commodity we put him on increased because he was on there," Clerc said.
"But we didn't look at it as selling any specific merchandise. We just wanted to make sure that racing fans associated us with Mark and more than that with NASCAR racing. That happened."
So if the sponsorship worked so well, why would a company with sales of $13.7 billion in 2000 pull the plug on a sponsorship that likely cost less than $5 million a year? That decision may be the strongest evidence that Winn-Dixie knew what it was doing. The grocery chain couldn't envision a Busch life without Mark, its signature driver, who retired from the Busch Series after last year.
It also couldn't justify spending nearly $3 million a year - the price of front-running primary sponsorships in the Busch Series - now that an expanded schedule has taken about half of the season's 33 races outside of the 13 states in which Winn-Dixie has more than one store.
"The cost escalated as the sport grew and began to spread from the Southeast into a larger part of the country," Clerc said. "We were faced with escalating costs to pay for coverage that exceeds what we can take advantage of.
"We enjoyed it while we did it. But it outgrew us."
