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2. The Road to Recovery: IndyCar vs. F1 teaches us about positioning:
Big Ideas:
- Positioning is the essence of strategy. You choose what you are for or what you are against.
- This strategy won’t be a miracle. We won’t know the success of this for another year or two.
- Diagnosis is key to a strong strategy.
I like this one because it specifically raises the issue of positioning.
Positioning is the essence of strategy because it requires you to make a choice. You are for something or you are against your competition. The choice drives your strategy.
In this case, IndyCar is making sure that they are “accessible” versus F1 which they point to as being “elite”.
Granted, I’d be more into the “elite” stuff, but that’s me.
It is this choice that drives their strategic decision-making process.
How do they get there?
This is maybe the most important part of the whole process because it points to the ability of IndyCar to do a good job of diagnosis.
Getting your diagnosis right is a real key to a successful strategy and successful marketing campaigns.
An incomplete list of the things you should look at to complete your diagnosis:
- Secondary research
- Historical campaigns and research
- Founders
- Competition
- Focus groups
- And, on…
Doing a proper and thorough job of diagnosing your situation will help decide the success or failure of your strategy. I’m going to look at putting together a webinar or something around doing a proper diagnosis in the fall.
All of this is to get to the point of asking the question: “When will we know if this position is successful?”
The answer is going to be unsatisfying to the quick-fix crowd, but it is likely going to be another year or two before we can tell whether or not the IndyCar strategy is working.
Why is that?
First, the Penske team took over IndyCar in January 2020. Without a pandemic, the first year is already a wash because that’s the old team’s work.
A new team is going to want to go in and do their work and set their strategy. This means they are stuck with the old strategy for 6-12 months, depending on their calendar.
Second, any strategy that has a significant positioning angle or heavy brand work, which this one seems to include, is going to need time to work.
I’ve written about the through line over the years and that means that you have to deliver on your brand promise and position consistently for a few years to begin to see the real impact of your work.
You might get some short-term sales activation results, but those taper off if you don’t consistently spend time and resources on your brand.
Remember, the long and short. You can’t do brand or sales activation. To achieve maximum impact, you must do both.
Like Colin Lewis mentioned in a post I shared on LinkedIn, I’m confident in the position IndyCar has picked. But the truth is that none of us can tell you with certainty if it will pan out.
Action Items:
- Know your position. Are you for something or against the competition? Make the choice.
- Do some diagnostics on your business. Start by looking around at secondary research that you can find on the internet. If you get deep into that, maybe you want to start talking with customers next.
- Understand that any strategy you take action on that includes significant brand building will require 2-3 years before you have the full scope of the impact. You should see results from your sales activation work in year 1, but you’ll not know the full impact of your plan until year 3 or so.