Big Ideas:
- Brand awareness has been working for F1 and is likely to work in the case of Bayer Leverkusen.
- The history of your club matters, a lot.
- You have to take control of your brand building because there is no guarantee that anyone will do it well for you.
This is a good way to start the week when I’ve been clearance to return to my normal activities since most of the work I’ve been doing has had an element of brand strategy and corporate strategy.
And, that’s likely to continue and increase because recovery will require a greater emphasis on three interlocking concepts:
- Strategy
- Brand
- Marketing
The first thing that jumps out to me in the above story is the way that the strategies of the football club and the corporate owners are working together to drive awareness for both brands with this tour of Mexico.
For a lot of folks, strategy is a word that is misused or misunderstood because folks aren’t clear on the definition or they are using it to refer to tactics.
In my telling, strategy entails answering questions and making choices.
No answers, no strategy.
No choices, no strategy.
The big decision is to define success.
What does success look like?
You move on to define your target market, your value proposition, the resources you need, and the actions you will take.
Again, in “The Whiteboard Workshop” or many of my public workshops, we do this. So that you can take new, focused actions right away.
What’s on display in this example is the power of the combination of both brands playing together.
There is no bones about this being a tool to promote the 100th anniversary of Bayer being in Mexico. But what isn’t explicitly laid out is that this highlights a powerful idea in branding which is the power of your history, your founder, and your actions over time to enhance the strength of your brand and give you greater ability to penetrate your market.
This action is Brand Building 101.
The second idea that I like in this story is the focus on building brand awareness across Mexico, North America, and Central America.
A few weeks ago, we talked about F1 and the success of bringing the sport to new markets like Miami, but one topic we haven’t touched on a lot is that one of the big brand building activities that F1 has undergone is their Netflix show.
I’d also put the NFL in this category with the success of Hard Knocks over the years.
Why?
Because it highlights another important lesson for any brand managers or marketers, which is the need to look to expand your market to reach more folks…not to just convert the “loyalists” that might already be interested in your team or events. As Professor Byron Sharp calls it, “go for penetration”.
When I chatted with Ruth Hartt about the “Jobs to be Done” theory, this idea is at the heart of all of what folks need to think about now because often folks might not necessarily think about going to a baseball game, a concert, or the theatre until you make it explicit that this is fun, a good way to entertain folks, or some other thing that they are looking for.
You have to expand the reach of your marketing to hit more people.
Which brings me to the final point: you have to do this work on your own.
For far too long, too many businesses, especially in sports, have left too much of the marketing job up to their partners like Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, etc.
That’s not good enough.
Just like too many organizations in the arts and theatre have fallen down the rabbit hole of only doing tactics.
Again, not good enough.
You need to get your arms around the totality of the job at hand from understanding what success looks like, to the market you serve, to your value proposition, and on.
Establishing a brand is difficult work. It takes focus and effort.
Building a strategy is hard work. You need to find a through line.
And, tactically, the job is tougher and tougher because their is more noise, more competition, and more demand for people’s attention. Also, we are seeing that behaviors are changing like Corey Leff points out in his newsletter this week with the decline in group sales for sports teams.
The “unified” ticketing strategy is something I talked about with Kate Howard a while back and it still makes sense for anyone to have a look at their distribution methods for their tickets because it really touches all four of the Ps in the marketing mix and is essentially a huge part of the implementation of your marketing strategy.
Let’s put this in action:
- Start at the beginning by looking at what you want to achieve. You need to define success to ensure that your strategy is focused in the same direction as your tactics.
- Know that brand building is more important now than ever before. There is more competition, more noise, and more friction in your customer journey than ever before.
- Get your mind wrapped around your sales strategy. Remember, that the way that tickets are sold, your distribution strategy actually touches all 4 Ps of the marketing mix and this goes a long way to the success or failure of your marketing strategy.