• by Karl Greenberg , August 12, 2011

Two years ago, Valvoline created the "Valvoline Engine Guarantee," a new concept in the motor oil category. Instead of guaranteeing the product itself, the company guaranteed the engine receiving it. The company launched the program, which guarantees engines up to 300,000 miles with TV, radio, print and online ads, in-store elements and other outreach efforts.

This year the Ashland division is making the guarantee present on most marketing messages, but also doing a program around college football, in a fan polling program that launched last month. Valvoline partnered with SportingNews.com to create the effort, "Sporting News Fan Poll backed by the Valvoline Engine Guarantee." Young & Rubicam's Brand Buzz and Cohn & Wolfe (both under WPP) created the program.

The poll allows fans to vote on their college football pre-season top 25 for a head-to-head comparison with expert predictions and mainstream media-generated polls. Fans can submit their picks by visiting sportingNews.com/fanpoll. SportingNews.com also has a Valvoline-sponsored college football pre-season site, where columnists Matt Hayes and Steve Greenberg debate gridiron topics.

Valvoline's marketing messages on the fan poll site carry messages like: "Engineered with the most powerful ingredient an oil can provide: Certainty."

Pete Demko, director of marketing, global brands for Valvoline, tells Marketing Daily that marketing considerations aside, the partnership has created something different in the college sports arena: he says it's the first time there has been a real fan voice in this type of polling. "Typically, you have people like the AP out there, and the coaches poll, and there hasn't been much beyond that. So we are trying to get a big sample base of college football fans, and frankly the engagement has been phenomenal," he says. The poll now has over 12,000 entries.

Of the two-year-old Valvoline Engine Guarantee program, Demko says it is the largest consumer-engagement and CRM platform Valvoline has done, "and it's the biggest program we have had on the retail side for consumers who are changing their own oil. It's really the first big effort we have had to establish a dialogue with consumers, and we have had big response both on our own Web pages, customer care line and on the Valvoline Engine Guarantee Web site itself," he says.

Going forward, it's likely that Valvoline will stick with College football to do specific promotional activity around the guarantee, per Demko. "What we look for are properties or tie-ins where there is a logical relationship from a consumer-targeting standpoint -- with a property populated by people buying motor oil, for example -- or where it makes sense in terms of our message," he says.

"With the fan poll we saw a unique opportunity to get people involved in college football, since that tends to be very engaging with our consumers. But also there's the linkage with our message: anything can happen in football, but some things in life are guaranteed. That juxtaposition is just a neat way to get that message across."