Kia Motors America Inc. is playing some impressive moves on the sponsorship court.
All eyeballs are on its “luxury ambassador” LeBron James, who leads the Cleveland Cavaliers against the Golden State Warriors in the National Basketball Association championship series that kicked off last week.
Irvine-based Kia—the Official Automotive Partner of the NBA since 2008—also is a team sponsor for the Cavs and the Warriors, along with 12 other teams in the league. Its K900 sedan is the league’s official luxury vehicle and is endorsed by James, while its 2016 Optima is the Official Vehicle of the NBA—endorsed by NBA All-Star Blake Griffin of the Los Angeles Clippers.
The exposure has helped the automaker significantly elevate its brand profile, according to Vice President of Marketing Communications Tim Chaney.
The degree to which basketball-related marketing has helped Kia—which has nearly doubled its annual sales over the past five years, to 625,818 last year—is hard to pin down. But the automaker is getting some indication from recent statistics showing that the number of Kia buyers who also are NBA fans has more than tripled over the same period “while our competitors have either been flat over that same period or eroded among the NBA fans,” Chaney said. “Other data shows that NBA fans have a much higher brand opinion for Kia than non-NBA fans.”
Chaney declined to comment on Kia’s NBA sponsorship spending—which Chicago-based IEG estimates to be between $30 million and $35 million per year for deals with the league, individual teams and players—but said “it’s safe to assume it’s a significant investment in that space. But we wouldn’t be there unless we were happy with the return.”
The automaker uses third-party research to poll consumers who live near sponsored teams, making them likely to see in-arena signage, on-court promotions or test drive ticket giveaways at local Kia dealers. It compares current fan awareness, opinion and purchase consideration for Kia with the benchmark data it collected when it launched the sponsorship programs in 2008.
Kia’s overall media spending in 2015 totaled $336.2 million. It carved out $21.8 million for 18 spots that aired 674 times during the 2014-15 NBA season and another $1.8 million for 12 airings of three spots during the league’s championship series, according to iSpot.tv, a Bellevue, Wash.-based analytics firm that tracks national TV ads and their related digital activity in real time. The automaker upped its media budget during the regular 2015-16 season to $23.4 million, placing 23 TV spots 680 times. Post-season totals are not yet available.
“The brand has effectively taken car industry ownership of basketball in the country, which arguably gives it much more strength than spending the same amount on a sprinkling of rights across all of America’s major sporting codes where the brand would just get lost in the clutter,” said Simon Rines, editor of the Sponsorship Today report by IMR Sports Marketing in the U.K.
Kia’s logo also debuted on player jerseys during the NBA’s All-Star Game in Toronto in February and will appear again in Charlotte, N.C., next year.
“We were the first nonendemic brand on an All-Star jersey in any major pro sports league,” Chaney said. “We have that planned again for this upcoming All-Star game next February, so we’ll have a heavy presence there. We’ve been talking to the league for a while and trying to explore opportunities. We are all about doing new things and trying to innovate in that space, so it was interesting to see that the owners finally came together. It’s a common thing in Europe, particularly on soccer jerseys.”
The Philadelphia 76ers, one of the 14 NBA teams sponsored by Kia, will feature a StubHub logo on its game-day jerseys in the 2017-18 season, the team announced last month. It’s the first deal under a three-year pilot program approved by the NBA Board of Governors in April that could generate about $100 million annually for the league. It might pain Chaney to see another brand’s name on a Kia-sponsored team, but he has a budget to stick to.
“We invest heavily in the league—14 out of 30 teams, national media, player endorsements—–and adding jersey patches on top of that is a decision that we’ll continue to evaluate as we go forward,” Chaney said. “The teams are valuing their [logo pricing], and some we expect will value them very high, and quite frankly it’s not incremental media or budget for an advertiser like us. If we decided to do that, the money would come from [what we invest] in media in the NBA on other things, with the teams themselves or the league itself.”
Its other team sponsorships include the Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets, Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Clippers, Miami Heat, New York Knicks, Oklahoma City Thunder, Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns, Portland Trail Blazers and San Antonio Spurs.
