Advance Auto Parts is on the upswing of its comeback, making it the right time for a brand marketing campaign, said Bruce Starnes, Chief Merchandising Officer at Advance Auto Parts.
The car maintenance parts retailer launched 94 years ago serving both professionals, local businesses and everyday car enthusiasts. Today the brand is publicly traded, operates more than 4,300 stores with 60,000 employees. In the past few years, the brand has had to focus on the “core fundamentals” of its business including closing underperforming stores, expanding the parts it carries and ensuring the standards for how it operates stores, Starnes said.
While the brand still invested in bottom-of-the funnel marketing during the time, the retailer has been “pretty light” on top-of-funnel marketing, he said.
In May, Advance Auto Parts posted Q1 2026 comparable sales growth of 3.5% year over year, which was its strongest quarterly growth in five years.
“Now that we’re finally at a spot where those things are coming together, it’s time to talk to the customer and remind them, ‘Hey, we’re pretty good at this. We’re pretty good at serving you and we’ve been doing this a long time.’” Starnes said.
Advance Auto Parts Kicks Off ‘Good Parts’ Campaign
To that end, Advance Auto Parts kicked off the summer with a brand campaign “Good Parts.” The slogan is a nod to its merchandise and allows the brand to connect to its customers, stating its brand exists to help consumers repair their cars and then get back to “the good parts” of their lives.
With this Fourth of July marking America’s 250th birthday, the campaign also has elements of nostalgia and American car culture to emphasize the brand’s long history as well.
“Our ability to connect to our heritage, our expertise has been important and this campaign allows us to tell that story a little bit more emotionally than we’ve done in the past,” Starnes said.
Foot Traffic Starts As Web Traffic
Advance Auto Parts is optimistic the campaign will deliver its sales goals, Starnes said.
“The goal is, frankly, does it deliver traffic that delivers incremental sales to the stores?” Starnes said. “It’s quite simply that. Are we seeing coming from this campaign additional traffic that drives incremental sales in our stores?”
And foot traffic in stores typically begins as traffic online, he said.
“Foot traffic is super important, but foot traffic starts almost all the time digitally,” he said. “Your car doesn’t start, one of of the first things you do is, you go to Google and start that campaign, or increasingly so, you go into the different AI platforms.”
Because the brand has tapped the breaks on brand awareness campaigns, it may take awhile to realize these results, Starnes said. So far, the spot has had positive social media reception, he said.
Advance Auto Parts began working on the campaign at the end of 2025 and made a “big jump” in its investment of it compared with its average, Starnes said without revealing specifics. This campaign will run through summer, but it plans to use the concept of “Good Parts” for long after.
Broadening the Campaign to its Sponsorships
Advance Auto Parts also has sponsored NASCAR driver Ryan Blaney since 2019, as well as Team Penske and the No. 12 car. In conjunction with this campaign, the brand featured the “Good Parts” creative on Blaney’s car at a race in May, which is called a “paint out.”
Advance Auto Parts does not sponsor every race but has a few full-car paint schemes each year. The retailer measures the return on this sponsorship through sales, social media impressions and store foot traffic.
“The NASCAR customers are our customer,” Starnes said. “They’re passionate about automobiles. They’re passionate about racing. When we have these paint outs, we have a tremendous amount of impressions that go through that and then we look in and see how those impressions translate into sales.”