When used-car retailer CarMax underwent a brand repositioning a few years ago, it turned to one of the trendiest sports in the country to do it.
The company wanted to be seen as more online and was generally seeking to modernize its image, CMO Sarah Lane said. Enter basketball.
“It’s a place where younger people are, [has] a very diverse audience, and [is] certainly very connected with culture—sneaker culture, fashion culture, all the things that are great to align with if you’re trying to modernize something,” Lane said.
CarMax was named the official auto retailer of both the NBA and WNBA in December 2020, when WNBA sponsorships were less common. As the league’s record 2024 season wraps up and interest in women’s basketball continues to reach all-time highs, CarMax’s once-novel partnership is paying off, Lane said.
Good old days
Since CarMax started working with the NBA and the W, the brand has featured athletes from both leagues in its ads. One series of the brand’s early basketball spots starring Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry and WNBA legend Sue Bird went viral in 2021.
“We got a bunch of earned media for that spot, and people were talking about it all over the place,” Lane said. “We were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this really is striking a chord and saying something about us that I think is hard for us to say about ourselves’...From that point, we said, ‘This is more than just advertising.’”
From there, CarMax got more strategic pushing into women’s sports, Lane said. In 2022, CarMax became the first official auto retailer of the NWSL and the presenting sponsor of the NWSL Shield award. Around that time, the brand also added W teams like the New York Liberty, the Phoenix Mercury, and the Washington Mystics to its sponsorship roster.
All of those sponsorships are carefully measured, Lane said. “We make sure that the dollars are working for us,” she said. “It’s a business, at the end of the day. This is absolutely not a charity, and so we are looking at every little nook and cranny of the buys.”
Change up
Last year, CarMax joined the WNBA’s Changemakers program, a group of six brands committed to elevating the league and its players through marketing and other collaboration beyond financial support. As part of the program, CarMax has provided media and brand partnership training sessions for athletes, including for around a dozen rookies this year, Lane said.
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Changemakers get sponsorship assets like on-court logo placements, and this year for the first time, CarMax activated at WNBA All-Star Weekend in Phoenix, Arizona, “a really important market for us,” Lane said. The brand hadn’t previously done many event sponsorships, and Lane said she saw it as a learning opportunity, but it still exceeded expectations: At least 5,000 people stopped by CarMax’s space over the weekend, and the brand also saw about 700,000 social media impressions on its All-Star content.
Lane is still waiting on results of the W sponsorship from this season, but said she expects viewership to have “far exceeded everything that we thought it would when we planned for all of this” and feels confident the brand’s metrics are trending upward. Media equivalency is a particularly important measure of ROI for the brand, as are social impressions, which have “exploded” lately, Lane said. CarMax also conducts brand affinity studies among fans of the league and the teams it sponsors, which have historically shown “outsized growth” for its women’s sports sponsorships, including a 20% higher lift associated with the WNBA versus the NBA, she said.
Lane has high hopes for the postseason: Unanimous league MVP A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces and Sabrina Ionescu of the Liberty, who are both Olympic gold medalists, star in CarMax’s latest ads alongside Bird that have been airing this season. The timing is especially fortuitous, since both the Aces and the Liberty made the second round of the playoffs, where they’re currently facing off in a repeat of last year’s finals.
“Our ads will play very nicely next to both of those teams as they take that journey,” Lane said.