The Super Bowl, March Madness, even the term “Friday night lights”: It would be difficult to find a person in the United States who doesn’t know what these are. Sports are truly a cultural pillar—and a great way to connect with customers.

With the right partnerships, sports loyalty can transfer to other brands. For companies that implement sports marketing strategies, the ultimate goal is loyalty—same as with sports teams, said Nick Triantafellou, director of marketing and merchandising at Weigel’s. 

“Fandom is so ultimate, right? For example, being someone that is a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, and my family being from Philadelphia, I have never once in my life had a friend who was a fan of the Dallas Cowboys,” Triantafellou said. “It just won’t happen, because that’s fandom. And we want … to have that connection with our customers. It’s all about fandom and meeting our customers where they are, and this is what they care about.” 

Learning From a Leader

Powell, Tennessee-based Weigel’s signed its first name, image and likeness (NIL) deal in 2022 with Evan Russell, a University of Tennessee baseball player. The company has continued to lean into NIL deals, expanding from just a couple of athletes at the university to 46 athletes from schools across Tennessee. 

Over the years, Weigel’s NIL strategy has shifted. At first, the program was led by social media posts from the athletes, as well as promotional signage in stores. “Now we run full-scale marketing campaigns with TV commercials and loyalty program incentives,” said Triantafellou. 

As the strategy evolved, the company tried multiple different integrations with the athletes, including LTO meals named after an athlete. But, Triantafellou noted, it just didn’t work for Weigel’s and its customers. 

What has worked for Weigel’s is gamifying its partnered athletes’ performance in-app with rewards. “It’s not the traditional gamification that people think about, like scratch games or an arcade, like we have in our app,” Triantafellou said. “It’s the gamification of [the athlete’s] game back into our loyalty and social media. It drives massive app engagement, and it definitely drives our social media engagement.” 

In 2025, MyWeigel’s Rewards has given away more than 185,000 bottles of 24-ounce Coca-Cola, tied directly to the performance of the baseball and softball teams. As the teams kept winning and moving forward in the postseason, more customers got free Cokes. 

Weigel’s loyalty program, built with these NIL activations, in May won the platinum Creative Campaigns and Communications award from Loyalty360, the association for customer loyalty. 

Thinking Local, Local, Local

Charlottesville, Virginia-based Tiger Fuel, operator of The Market by Tiger Fuel stores, has multiple stores located near the University of Virginia. The company itself is owned by two University of Virginia alumni, and the c-store company is “entrenched in the UVA community,” according to Maurice Lamarche, vice president of retail operations for The Market stores. The Market at Bellair, Tiger Fuels’ original flagship location, began cultivating a relationship with the university when the store opened in 1991. Today, it makes catering deliveries almost daily to the UVA campus and other businesses that surround or support the college—even when school is out of session. 

Student athletes became regular customers, and soon enough the teams were reaching out to The Market for its meals. “We built up a pretty regular system of feeding UVA teams, and that has kind of morphed into visiting teams reaching out to us too,” said Lamarche. “Often we’ll be feeding the visiting women’s lacrosse team or the swim team.” 

It goes beyond food deliveries. The Market stores partner with UVA across multiple sports in their marketing. Some of it is more traditional, such as signage on scoreboards and on LED screens, but it also does some more creative promotions on campus. “For example, during football games, we rent golf carts, and we roll through the stadium lots … promoting our catering,” said Sara Belkowitz, marketing director at Tiger Fuel. “We toss teeny-tiny footballs to people who always stop by and say hi. We give them coupons.” 

A new promotion this year will give one local kid a behind-the-scenes tour of all UVA basketball logistics and tickets to a game. 

Other innovative sports marketing from The Market stores includes:

• The Market’s logo is featured on the dance cam at UVA basketball games.
• “Three Up, Three Down.” The Market stores will give away free sandwiches if the UVA pitcher strikes out or retires the first three batters at the bottom of the third inning.
• Riding in golf carts, employees from Tiger Fuel celebrated football tailgaters and gave away prizes “for whoever was having an awesome tailgate. We took pictures, and the crew that won Best Tailgate got free catering for their next tailgate event from The Market,” said Lamarche.

Last year, Tiger Fuel signed its first NIL deal with UVA student athlete Kymora Johnson, who grew up in the area. And the company has worked with Johnson on quite a few projects. It offered an LTO combo on the menu, handed out an “exam cram” box for students during winter finals, had Johnson host a basketball clinic for middle-school-age girls playing basketball and had her judge a kid’s dunk contest at a basketball game. 

The Kymora Johnson “Exam Cram” box was filled with water, energy drinks, candy and snacks—everything a student would need in preparing for exams. The boxes were given away at some stores, and Johnson also handed out the boxes in an on-campus event during exam week. 

Sponsor a Team—or an Organization

This past spring, Circle K and Minor League Baseball (MiLB) announced a new national partnership, with Circle K named as the Official Convenience Store of Minor League Baseball. Throughout the 2025 season, the Circle K brand was integrated into the in-stadium experience at most MiLB ballparks.

Before the national partnership with MiLB, Circle K’s franchise division sponsored nine individual teams for the back half of last year with Diamond Baseball Holdings, which operates more than 40 minor-league teams.  

The reception to the national partnership has been extremely positive. “We have local park activations between innings that are very, very well received, and the organic social media exposure that we get from those spots has just been tremendous,” said Greg Dean, director of franchise marketing for Circle K.

Circle K business units worked closely with the individual teams to figure out what between-inning activations would work best, including those that have worked in the past. “It really helps to give that localized feel, rather than feeling very stale,” Dean said. “They could be anything from a Polar Pop drinking contest to a ‘freeze cam’ with our Froster frozen beverage to whatever crazy things these teams come up with.”

Circle K also is the official sponsor of the Baseball Traveler, Ben Hill. Hill travels around the country visiting different MiLB stadiums, collecting stories about the games, the food and the history of the stadium. “He doesn’t necessarily focus on the games. He focuses on the activities in the parks, the cool things, the different kinds of food,” said Dean. “He actually has food tasters that he recruits from fans attending the games. When they go to the park, they try the food for him, and then he comments on it. He posts these on social media. … He also has appearances on the Major League Baseball network, which really allows the Circle K brand to get national exposure.”

All About Community

C-stores are community stores. Sports marketing is, essentially, another way to reach out and connect to the local community. 

The relationship between Tiger Fuel and UVA began first with the owners, proud UVA alumni raised by proud UVA alumni. “Even more so than that, we’re a smaller town, and UVA is a big part of the community,” Lamarche said. “Being locally rooted and then being able to support something that’s also locally rooted just feels really good. It feels right from a partnership perspective.”

For its first NIL deal, Tiger Fuel chose Johnson because she grew up in the area. Regardless of her performance on the basketball court (she had a record-breaking year), customers are excited when they see photos and signage of her in a store, Belkowitz said. 

“It’s been a delight to partner with her and see the community reaction to that,” she said. “We’ll be at an event and have her posters there, and we’ll see people light up because they know her. When we took her LTO combo off the menu, we had people reach out and ask where it’s gone.”

“We really want to partner with athletes from here who … instead of going to a different market, have decided to stay local and play for the hometown team,” she said. 

Lamarche said the customer response to these promotions is indicative of how genuine the relationship between Tiger Fuel and the community is. “We’re the local team. We’re the hometown team,” he said. “And we’ll go to a basketball game, a baseball game or a football game, and … we’ll see our presence there—not only in the assets that we have up there but in the crowd. We’ll see folks wearing Market hats or Tiger Fuel hats.”

For Circle K, the MiLB partnership has allowed the brand to connect with consumers in smaller communities at the ballpark and in-store. “In the past, we’ve never been able to merchandise or to market in some of these areas because we didn’t have enough site count,” Dean said. “You could have an area that has two or three stores, with a minor league team that’s close, but we were never able to do billboards or traditional advertising. But this MiLB relationship gives us a way to engage and connect with customers in these communities through a pro sports experience at a fraction of the cost.”

While at a Circle K in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Dean said he watched “customers walk into our store and get so excited just about spinning a wheel to win a prize. It could be a Polar Pop. It could be a t-shirt. They just get so excited about that local activation.” He said that’s what Circle K wanted to focus on with this partnership: getting down to the local level and making sure it is fully engaged with local communities.

Weigel’s NIL deals also help the company give back. At Christmastime, the athletes come out and support the community with the annual Weigel’s Family Christmas event. “Seeing the kids’ faces light up when they meet our NIL athletes is amazing to see,” Triantafellou said. The athletes and other volunteers take more than 250 children from local communities—kids that otherwise wouldn’t have a Christmas—on a shopping trip to pick out gifts for themselves. 

When the University of Tennessee baseball team won the national title last year, Weigel’s worked with 10 vendors in addition to Coca-Cola to create a giveaway program. There was tremendous traffic in stores, Triantafellou said, but there were also “hundreds of comments from people just saying, ‘No one else is doing this like you guys are; you actually care about what we care about.’”