Nasal Strips

Nasal Strips For Everyone At The Belmont Stakes

Launching into sponsorships with major sports properties and buying network advertising time aren’t decisions that businesses are known to make quickly. There’s no horsing around – thorough analysis and due diligence are the order of the day. Usually.

But sometimes life, and business, is about seizing the moment. That’s what GlaxoSmithKline is doing at this year’s Belmont Stakes, the big annual thoroughbred race in New York that’s poised to draw a bigger crowd than usual at the track and on NBC’s broadcast thanks to the buzz surrounding California Chrome’s bid for the Triple Crown.

Included in the extra buzz surrounding this year’s Belmont is a mini-controversy over a set of nasal strips that Chrome normally wears. The New York Racing Association initially frowned on them, but then reversed course after being satisfied that the strips aren’t performance enhancers. The end result, in addition to California Chrome getting the go-ahead: everyone spent a week or so talking about nasal strips.

That’s what got GlaxoSmithKline – which makes strips for humans, not horses – to make a sudden jump into the starting gate as a Belmont sponsor (the equine strips are manufactured by Flair, a Minnesota-based company). GSK makes a brand of strips called Breathe Right, worn periodically by NFL players and other athletes. The athlete-advantage angle has faded in recent years, so the company now keeps its marketing limited to sufferers of nasal congestion and excessive snoring. June, which tends to bring allergies, is a good time of year to tout the product. Breathe Right dominates the market, estimated at $120 million annually, with an 80% share.

California Chrome owners Steve Coburn and Perry Martin are now pitching for GlaxoSmithKline

With all the fuss over the past two weeks, GSK jumped on an opportunity to parlay attention from Flair’s equine strips to their human version. In almost no time, the company signed as an official sponsor to both the Belmont Stakes and California Chrome, with the horse’s suddenly-famous owners, Steve Coburn and Perry Martin, posing for publicity shots with their noses clad in nasal strips. A TV ad featuring a jockey going to bed in his strips, dubbed “Bed Time Stakes,”will air four times on NBC during its race coverage. And the company will hand out 50,000 free samples to Belmont goers on Saturday – that’s roughly a quarter-million dollars in merchandise – complete with purple and green Sharpies that fans can use to decorate them in California Chrome’s colors.

It’s too soon to tell how much all of this will spike business, acknowledges Mandy Hennebry Breathe Right’s Senior Brand Manager for the past two years. But she’s loving the response. “The interest online has been huge,” she says. “People are talking about us onTwitter TWTR -1.65%, people are contacting us, we’ve never had this much discussion online before.”Does this mean a bigger menu of horse racing-themed marketing ahead? Even that’s too early to say, according to Hennebry. “Right now it’s just a moment in time kind of thing,” she says. And why not? Sometimes you have to seize that moment.