A visible example of brand loyalty is “when people want to be associated with the brand,” said VP Racing Fuels’ Ben Dolan. “Our apparel is made for people in motorsports who are living the lifestyle and want to wear the brand.”

Tips from successful racing industry professionals on ways to keep customers coming back for more.

Getting a customer to try your product and having that customer return for more are two distinct buying decisions. Product awareness and consideration influence that first step, while product quality is the cornerstone of the second. Other factors, though, play a role in a customer’s buying behavior beyond that first purchase. Here, three industry experts offer distinct takes on what those factors are.

Performance is King

“Consistency and consistent quality” are key to brand loyalty at VP Racing Fuels, San Antonio, Texas, “but for our customers it is more than that. Performance is also king for all our products,” said Ben Dolan. “We keep innovating and iterating, and that’s a big part of what leads to a really high perceived value for our customer. They’ve gotten something that is a premium product with a high perceived value because of all of the investment we make into making sure that it is the best product available. That then creates another pillar of brand loyalty, which is brand trust. They come to trust us because of that consistency and because of that performance.”

Dolan said he can’t walk through an airport “without someone stopping me to tell me, ‘I race, and I just love your fuel. It smells so good and makes so much power.’ That experience they have, and then the brand trust and perceived value, all come together.”

Working closely with engine builders and other experts is another way VP builds credibility and brand loyalty, Dolan said. “When they see that the products work well, they build their engines around using VP fuels or VP lubricants. They’ll get to where they require our products, because they know they can eliminate lubricant- or fuel-related issues by using them and building their engine to use VP products.”

It helps, too, that the people at VP Racing “have shared values with our customers,” Dolan added. “We love motorsports, and we love our customers, so it’s become a lifestyle brand over the last 47 years because we live it, we’re at the events, we engage across all different types of motorsports.”

That lifestyle aspect is the reason VP brought its apparel in-house, Dolan said. “Our apparel is made for people in motorsports who are living the lifestyle and want to wear the brand. That’s another example of brand loyalty: when people want to be associated with the brand. That’s the reason why at the SEMA and PRI shows we’ll go through thousands of stickers. People want it on their car, on their motorsport container, on other products they use. It’s the perception of the brand.”

Availability

To promote brand loyalty, the “biggest thing you have to have in the current market is availability,” said Joe Maylish of MAHLE Motorsport, Fletcher, North Carolina. “Sometimes your availability is your best ability. Post COVID-19 2020, there has been huge demand for aftermarket and high-performance parts. Before the pandemic, we were more in line with production times. Now, a customer that used to enjoy another brand, if they don’t have it, they may come across our brand.”

MAHLE also has “a large number of customers who are willing to wait for our pistons if they have to, or will use nothing but our product,” Maylish said. “A lot of that has to do with the fact that on the motorsports side, our staff are the same engineers that work with numerous professional race teams. A lot of professional engine builders like our product because it’s very exact. When they get it, it’s within such close tolerances that they don’t want to use anything else.”

The “easiest sale when it comes to pistons,” said Maylish, is the customer “who has had our piston in their engine four, five, eight years down the road, and they call us and say, ‘I’ve got this piston in my engine, and I want to punch it out another tenth.’ They love how the pistons look, how everything looks in their engine. They have proof right in front of them that this has worked great. They don’t want to change anything, just punch it out a little more and get another piston in there from MAHLE.”

Good customer service also builds brand loyalty, Maylish said. “You can do all the advertising you want, have all the pro drivers out there that endorse your product that you want, but if you don’t have knowledgeable people picking up the phone and able to dissect a tech question or help them figure out something they’re trying to do, all the efforts you’re doing everywhere else will not retain a customer.”

Educational Leader

“We’ve focused on being an educational leader of the industry,” said Kyle Fischer of Hot Shot’s Secret (HSS), Mt. Gilead, Ohio. Lubricants and additives “is a difficult product category to explain through any type of traditional marketing or advertising, so we’ve learned how important it is to educate our consumer. That in turn has had us look at the bigger picture and make a conscious effort to talk to consumers directly and educate them about the diesel platform itself. When they have a question, whether it has to do with our product or is just a general diesel question, we want to be the top source for all that knowledge. We create the environment where, if the consumer trusts you as an industry expert, they become loyal customers to your product.”

Fischer said the education process is similar “with top level racers. We take the time to educate them, to do the oil analysis on their race engines and walk through the analysis, show them what ppm is, for example, how antimony is protecting their bearings, those kinds of things.

“The relationship we have with the driver or sponsored team, and with the consumer, is very similar,” Fischer explained. “It is literally fueled by education and trust. That builds the long-term relationship, which builds the loyalty.”

HSS also benefits from a nimbleness that larger companies don’t have. Fischer talked about a competing company’s transmission fluid that had become very popular with drag racers. One of Fischer’s sponsored racers was being pressured by his transmission builder to switch to the new fluid. The racer called Fischer, who in turn explained the situation to his R&D department.

“They made him a custom transmission fluid, and it was out the door in 48 hours,” Fischer said. Not only did the fluid meet the racer’s expectations, but during post-race teardown, the transmission builder was so impressed by the condition of the transmission that he wanted some of the fluid for himself.

“That all happened in four phone calls and a couple weeks of work,” Fischer said, adding that the fluid “will probably be a new racing transmission fluid for us. That’s the type of stuff that creates the most extreme loyalty with my brand, especially from the sponsored racer side of things.”

SOURCES

Hot Shot’s Secret
hotshotsecret.com

MAHLE Motorsport
mahlemotorsports.com

VP Racing Fuels
vpracingfuels.com