In 1999 and 2000, Checkers Drive-In Restaurants was struggling to recover from a serious spin-out in the race for the quick-service winner’s circle. On the verge of bankruptcy and delisting by NASDAQ, the Tampa, Florida-based double drive-thru concept was in trouble.
“People questioned whether we were going to survive,” says Rich Turer, vice president of marketing for Checkers/Rally’s.
When a new management team took the controls one of its first goals was to get the company back on the fast track to profitability and positive brand positioning. With a cash infusion to give the company’s finances a jump-start, Checkers/Rally’s decided to rebuild its brands’ visibility and positive positioning by becoming the official burger of another prominent hometown turnaround team, the National Football League’s (nfl) Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Checkers/Rally’s sponsorship deal included signage, product sales, and giveaways at Buccaneers home games as well as special product bundles and promotional products at the chains’ units.
“We viewed it as one way to communicate a sense of our new stability in our home market,” Turer says. “And, based on our success in Tampa, we decided to expand our sponsorship efforts to teams in other key markets, including New Orleans and Atlanta.”
Although the company no longer sponsors the Buccaneers, its current roster includes three NFL teams—the Miami Dolphins, the Indianapolis Colts, and the Atlanta Falcons—and Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Devil Rays. On the collegiate level, Checkers/Rally’s has sports sponsorship deals with the University of Florida Gators, the Florida State Seminoles, and the University of Louisville Cardinals.
But the Checkers/Rally’s sports marketing engines really revved up into high gear in 2003 when it signed on for its first national affiliation, taking over the exclusive quick-service restaurant category sponsorship of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway after former sponsor McDonald’s contract expired.
As the official hamburger of the Brickyard 400, a NASCAR Winston Cup Series Event, and the Indianapolis 500, the premiere IRL IndyCar Series race, Checkers and Rally’s are entitled to sell their food at the speedway, use the Brickyard 400 and Indianapolis 500 logos in advertising and marketing materials, and post on-track signage. The brands can also take advantage of other national media-placement opportunities in and around the races.
“Our demographic has always been people with cars and our double- drive-thru concept focuses on speed and teamwork, so the tie-in was a natural,” Turer says. “Our restaurants are also heavily concentrated in the Southeast and Midwest, where there are 75 million NASCAR fans.”
Those numbers were enough to convince the majority of Checkers/Rally’s franchisees to put up the funds to make the deal possible, although the relationship between the brands and their operators were less than perfect at the time. “Until the turnaround, relationships between the franchisees and management had been nominal at best,” Turer says. “We saw this as an opportunity to move the relationship, as well as the brand, forward.”
Today, Checkers/ Rally’s has integrated its motorsports affiliation throughout it brands. Six of Checkers/Rally’s restaurants operate throughout the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, themed combo meals and mini-collectibles are sold on and off the track, race logos are included on packaging and advertising artwork, and events such as the Checkers/Rally Pit Stop Challenge and burger-eating contests are becoming commonplace.
Sports sponsorship has made it possible for Checkers/Rally’s to team up with household names. In 2006, the chain partnered with Coca-Cola to take modular motion-racing simulators, show cars, and celebrity drivers on a tour of Checkers/Rally’s locations during the NASCAR season. This holiday season, Office Depot will run an in-store cross promotion with the burger brand. These collaborations with big box retailers could lead to even bigger and better things for Checkers/Rally’s, including possible real-estate sharing opportunities. “For us, taking our place among bigger Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies as a name sponsor of such a major sport was a way of helping us to look bigger than we were,” Turer says.
Restaurant marketing strategist Aaron Allen, founder and CEO of Heathrow, Florida-based Quantified Marketing Group, isn’t surprised at the Checkers/Rally’s marketing mojo.
“Brand association is a powerful thing and strategic alliances among like-minded brands can help stretch each partner’s budget and enhance each one’s credibility,” Allen says. “People buy brands that are reflections of how they see themselves, so particular celebrities, sports, or music programs can be very helpful in pulling in specific demographics.”
To wit: Sonic Drive-In recently signed on as exclusive presenting partner of Nashville Star, USA Network’s country-music talent search, now in its fifth season. According to Sonic, the sponsorship will involve “all three phases of the Nashville Star franchise (casting, live, show, concert tour),” and, “will span across all major marketing components, including but not limited to signage at auditions, in-show integration, tagged on-air and custom integrated promo spots, consumer print advertising, radio campaigns, and grassroots marketing as well as an exclusive sponsored presence on the show’s official web site.”