2. The Road to Recovery: F1 ticket sales soar as the popularity of the sports grows:
Big Ideas:
- We touched on the importance of brand awareness last week. This continues that conversation.
- Expanding the market for your product is wise business right now.
- Don’t discount the limited nature of these events.
I’ve never been to F1, but I’m totally going to go to one of the classic races. I’d like to go to Dubai or Monte Carlo.
Anyway, last week we discussed brand awareness and F1.
Today, we are talking about how that has helped F1 increase ticket sales because the first part of a successful ticket sales effort is to increase brand awareness.
I’ve talked about my conversation with Ruth Hartt about the “Jobs to Be Done” theory in the past. While brand awareness has nothing to do with the theory, the theory and brand awareness are key to understanding the power of broadening the market for your awareness messaging.
Why?
Because people likely aren’t looking for a car race. I’m guessing that even folks that are into F1 aren’t really looking for a car race, but they are looking for some fun or a thing to do with their mates.
You need to drive long-term brand awareness because in most instances, around 95% or more of the market isn’t in the market for your product or service at any time. But brand awareness helps ensure that when they are, you have a chance to be at the top of their mind when they start looking for that “job to be done”.
In today’s environment, expanding the reach of your message is key because loyalty attention is likely to have a certain limit in your ability to win enough people back to your venues to achieve a successful recovery as the pandemic continues to impact sales, travel, and life.
I would be remiss in not pointing out an obvious point of consideration here. As we’ve noticed over the last few months, the one-off or big events like a concert or a Game 7 of a playoff series have had much more traction in the market when compared to a random regular season series or even baseball’s Opening Day in some markets.
In the case of F1, we shouldn’t lose sight of the limited nature of these events to drive their demand up as well.
But that’s a different conversation if we are in search of solutions there.
In action:
- Think long and short. Not just sales activation, but brand building.
- Tell emotional stories. Those build your brand.
- Create a sense of urgency in your purchase path by limiting availability, communicating the impact of attendance, or growing a sense of community.