Marketing A Sport: Strategies Seen In Formula One

Photo by Karo Kujanpaa on Unsplash

Sports marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to promote sports events, equipment, or products and services using athletes or teams. Its primary focus is to promote physical products or brand names. It's a service that advertises much more than just sport-related products; it allows for brand exposure and credibility through sports teams. Athletes and teams become influencers that impact the decision-making and attitudes of their audience.

To achieve the goal of promotion, many businesses take advantage of channels like sponsorships for individual athletes or teams, television, sports events, and advertisements. As sports marketing meets consumer needs, it follows the 4 P’s of marketing: product, price, promotion, and place. Additionally, the sports marketing matrix is divided into three distinct sections:

Advertising sports and/or sport businesses or associations like the NFL, the World Cup, and Formula One. Generally, it directly or indirectly promotes the “marketing of sports”.
It uses sport events, sport teams, and athletes for the purpose of product promotion.
It promotes sports on a global level to increase exposure and community participation.

There are two primary types of sports marketing:

• Marketing of sport, which comprises activities and competences intended to promote and enhance sport enjoyment and consumption.
• Marketing in sport, which involves aiming to bring the sport closer to end consumers, involving professional sports leagues, sports teams, and marketing operators.

Additionally, there exist secondary types of sports marketing closely related to sport products, such as marketing sports events, sport teams, sport businesses, stadiums, equipment, etc.

A sports marketing strategy that has seen success is the revival of Formula One. The lack of a digital marketing strategy posed a problem for F1. Despite the sport's advanced technology, it ironically had little presence in media and communication. To improve its exposure and popularity among the public, F1 implemented the following strategies:

• The use of understandable language, changing its rigid and technical terminology to adapt to more comprehensible language.
• Establishing a presence in digital media to attract the younger generation, focusing on platforms like YouTube.
• Utilizing Instagram to deliver daily content through stories, promoting and interacting with users.
• The introduction of streaming targeting a specific audience. The Netflix show "Drive to Survive" was a docu-series that followed the 2018 F1 championship. The platform introduced exclusive content showing behind-the-scenes action, rivalries, frustrations, and the essence of speed.

These are some of the strategies that F1 employed to enhance its presence and better comprehend the impact of sports marketing. To learn more about the strategies used by F1, you can visit one of the following links below.