Profit from motorsport – What is marketing?

It’s plenty of people speaking about marketing out there, but not all of them are real marketers. So here is a short guide to understand what marketing is and more specifically, what motorsport marketing is.

First of all, here is the marketing definition by the American Marketing Association:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

So, more generally, marketing views the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.

In other words, marketing has less to do with getting customers to pay for your product as it does developing a demand for that product and fulfilling the customer’s needs.

So how can we translate it into motorsport?

Firstly we have to understand who are the consumers and what are their needs. For instance, let’s analyze who are the team’s clients: drivers and sponsors. Anyway, generally, drivers need their own sponsors to race, so there is a crucial difference: sponsors are your final clients, drivers are only users! Infact they use services offered by team to satisfy sponsors’ needs, intended as mediatic exposure etc. (Obviously each business has a different situation and it should be treated as a single case, here is just an example.)

So what? If the objective is to identify who your customers are and satisfy them, the sponsorship is a way to help them to reach their marketing goals. Don’t forget that the motorsport sponsorship is only a marketing tool for sponsors to achieve their goals!

We can sum up the motorsport sponsorship process as follows:

• ANALYTIC PHASE: during this phase the agency/manager researches potential partners and sponsors looking at their previous sponsorship agreements, contacting insiders and people who may have some additional information.
• STRATEGIC PHASE: the second step is to elaborate a flexible plan to be presented to the potential partner. This plan should be flexible because, after the first meeting, it could be modified to fit sponsor’s marketing goals and budget.
• OPERATIONAL PHASE: if you arrived at the third stage, you already have a signed sponsorship agreement, but this is only the tip of the iceberg! Now you must work with your partner/sponsor to achieve their marketing goals through your sponsorship. For example: your partner wants to enter in a specified geographical market, so a possibility is to invite some potential business partners to a racing event held in that geographical area to discuss a collaboration agreement. The deals that will be signed during that event, or thanks to that event, should be included in the ROI calculation at the end of the season/agreement.

That’ all for now, if you have any doubts you can contact us at petrolheaditalia@gmail.com

Stay tuned for more marketing tips, #StayRacing.