We don’t do ‘badging exercises.’ This is not about ‘stickers on cars.’
The days of the corporate jolly left in the 80’s along with hair bands, acid wash, and tight rolled jeans. For our clients and potential clients, every great partnership starts with an organisational initiative or challenge followed by the various assets, tools, and activation plans that will truly drive impact—whether measurable or intuitive.
We know through our experience that motorsport and golf are incredibly powerful B2B tools for moving the needle across a number of core strategic challenges.
Geographic Expansion
Successful international expansion can depend on a variety of factors ranging from supply chain to distribution networks to taxes, but brand awareness in market sits at the top of the list. Localised brand awareness is critical in attracting great new talent, creating cultural associations, and driving customers and consumers into the top of the funnel. All of which can happen pre-or-post product launch or even availability.
Motorsport and golf platforms can provide the kind of assets to drive awareness of the brand while their unique experiential and hospitality assets provide a great way to engage and deepen key stakeholder relationships.
Motorsport fans reward brands with their wallets, spiking in both loyalty and proclivity to purchase. For example, NASCAR fans demonstrate a 50% purchase preference of sponsor brands over non-sponsor brands while Indy Car fans are 80% more likely to buy a sponsor’s product than the general population. Brands entering markets like the US on the back of these types of motorsport platforms are immediately creating the type of awareness and affinity critical for localised longevity.
Brand Awareness
While social & digital platforms have democratised marketing to an extent, they have also created a world of clutter and an ocean of brands. Above the line marketing is arguably now more important than ever for both B2C and B2B organisations. Motorsport platforms provide the mass market impressions across a multitude of channels that create the kind of brand recall that drives consideration, preference, loyalty, and margin.
Innovation Lab & Technology Showcase
It’s often said that nothing drives innovation like war...or golf & motorsport. Outside of invading your nearest country, the battle for milliseconds on the track drives innovation forward at a frenetic pace. And what better place to showcase organisational innovation and technology than at a glamorous golf or motorsport event. Certainly beats that tradeshow in Peoria.
Talent Attraction
Many years ago, famed McKinsey partner Steven Hankin, said ‘The war for talent is over, the employee won.’ Despite the somewhat glib humour, at the heart of the quote is that today’s talent is blessed by the choices and opportunities not necessarily afforded to previous generations. Brands not only need to find and engage talent across the channels where talent engages but also provide clear, differentiated content and experiences. Motorsport platforms provide emotionally engaging always-on content, brand visibility, brand association and assets for unique money-can’t-buy experiences.
Engaging Social & Digital Content
The ever-increasing amount of time spent online by enterprise customers and consumers is both a blessing and a curse. While organisations can reach target customers more effectively and efficiently, it also means that so too can competitors. If content is King, then continuity and context are Empress and Emperor. Online users engage with golf and motorsport related content more than any other sport while the year round calendars provide ongoing continuity contextualised with great organisational and brand themes such as ‘speed’, ‘high performance’, ‘reliability’, ‘precision’, ‘innovation’, ‘technology’, and ‘teamwork’.
Product Launch & Rollout
There are launches and there are damp squibs. Whether it’s an alignment of brand to product values, a key geographic ally, or just pure media exposure, aligning an upcoming product launch with a golf or motorsport partnership can ensure that a launch is more Apollo 11 than Cosmos 1.
Pre-IPO Analyst & Investor Engagement and Roadshow
EBITDA, burn rate, market share, growth potential, etc….are all major factors amongst others to drive institutional investment however often forgotten is the overall brand awareness to enhance consideration and demonstrate brand equity value to push the IPO share price significantly upwards well before the opening bell.
Golf and motorsport not only offers brand awareness at scale but also provides incredibly engaging locations for investor roadshow presentations and relevant technology demonstrations.
Employee Engagement
A complicated, multi-faceted, and much commented on corporate issue with no clear-cut solution. Despite its link to significant corporate asset value (organisations with highly engaged employees achieve 43% more revenue, 12% higher customer advocacy, 18% higher productivity and up to four times greater financial performance), employee engagement continues to decline globally with only 32% of UK employees and 28% of US employees reportedly ‘engaged.’ Despite grand gestures like unlimited vacation days, free Starbucks, and ping pong tables employees still report that their biggest angst comes from their direct line manager who continually fail drop the ball describing the forward vision, setting stretch goals, providing frequent feedback, and ongoing coaching. In other words, dynamic performance management. Organisations demonstrating dynamic performance management report a 65% increase in overall employee engagement.
Golf and motorsport are incredibly powerful platforms to angle at organisational dynamic performance management especially at front line managers where even a 1% increase in performance can have significant organisational impact. When the difference between first and last can be less than a second, golf and motorsport teams must be world-class in communicating the forward vision, setting goals, providing frequent feedback and ongoing coaching. While those lessons transfer directly to the corporate enterprise, motorsport also provides great themes for ‘Racing to employee engagement targets’, ‘Grid rankings for team engagement levels’, etc…
For example, Spanish banking giant Santander used Formula 1 to actively engage their employees during the acquisition of UK bank Abbey National and several other regional banks. The company adopted the philosophy that when you have a global workforce of disparate brands you need to give them some motivational tools that reflect positively on the business and communicate its aspirations for the future as one organisation with shared goals. To measure F1’s effectiveness, Santander conducted an internal staff survey which revealed that 96% of its employees agreed that the sponsorship generated improved business results.
