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DIFFERENT, BETTER, AND FIRST
By Thomas Amshay

When selling a product, be it sponsorship or shoes, the marketing person’s job is to come up with techniques that will position the product as “different and better than anything else” on the market. When you pull this off, you get attention. When you are the first to bring the well-positioned product to market, you will dominate even when the competition kicks in with “me-toos”. In a nutshell, that’s what marketing is all about. But, it is much more difficult to do than it is to talk about.

Marketing’s difficulty factor is why competing products blur into boring sameness and drive consumers to buy the one with the lowest price. Stand in the soda aisle at the grocery store and watch which cola brand sells first. It is the one on special. Guaranteed!

Racing teams blur into boring sameness, too. If not for the different colors, you could barely tell them apart. It’s like they are cloned (incidentally, clones don’t have personalities). Virtually no charismatic drivers or crew members, and social skills are pretty much on vacation. That’s why, in the pro pits, the crowd almost always migrates to the team warming up their car. Sorry, almost all the players are boring.

There is more to this, but the point I am trying to make is that the only thing that makes people and products standout is DIFFERENCE. And at the track, the teams are clueless about how to differentiate themselves. And that is why most of them have no following and could not sell an affinity marketing benefit to a potential sponsor. Actually, most of them probably don’t even know what affinity marketing is. But that’s a topic for another column.

Among all racers in the U.S. — especially in the drag racing marketplace, John Force is usually held up as an icon. I totally agree: he is a recognizable and memorable character, because he is different. Some racers poke fun at him but it is jealousy that motivates them. Without writing an unauthorized biography of John Force, I would submit that the reason he stands out is that he projects his own personality.

Unfortunately, most racers exude no personality. There seems instead to be a collective personality, but it is stodgy, uptight and drips with false arrogance of a “nobody” gaining their fifteen minutes of fame. Racers predictably are someone else in their interviews. They go through spurts; one season someone might honestly thank God for everything that happened, and the next thing you know there is an onslaught of race track conversions. The next season they might thank their families. I think this year everyone is trying to sound like NASCAR racers, who seem to be trying to act like winning a race is more important than curing cancer.

The last memorable finish line interview I recall is Gordie Bonin exiting the Bubble-Up car through the roof hatch and not even trying to contain how excited it was to drive the car. Bronin dug racing and didn’t try to be the big shot just because he got lucky and got a ride. He came across as a real human being instead of a wooden-headed puppet. Same with John Force.

However, the market can only stand one John Force; if you mimic him you’ll be a cheap imitation. John Force was here first, and first and different are what count. If you don’t have your own personality, get one. Quit trying to be this thing that racers seem to think they are supposed to be.

Incidentally; puppet heads are not just in drag racing. Parker Johnstone was the last memorable personality in CART. I’m not sure that NASCAR ever had one.
 

WILL THE REAL MARKETING GENIUS STAND UP
Know what compels someone to make a purchase is the Business Holy Grail. A person who understands it is in big demand. This is so important that at the high ends of business and academia there are people who spend their careers trying to figure it out. Occasionally, I get to work with some of those folks and I thoroughly enjoy it but they are doing R&D and it is totally different than in-the-trenches marketing. The R&D stuff is expensive, slow and wasteful at times, bureaucratic, and… excuse me, almost unusable by the typical business person. I did the R&D stuff, but I learn the most when I am hired by successful entrepreneurs. 

Entrepreneurs are vastly different from the corporate people and professors. Entrepreneurs create products and businesses almost out of thin air and make them successful; they may not have studied marketing or know all its nuances, but they know how to sell their wares—profitably. Better yet, they communicate in English instead of the gibberish that the pros use. The gibberish, I am convinced, is used to throw the accountability-hounds off the trail of their inability to sell the products at a profit.

Entrepreneurs are bottom-liners. They are responsible for the survival of their enterprise; they can not do stuff that doesn’t work, because they have no corporate money-net to catch them. Paramount among the differences between entrepreneurs and corporate employees is that except for those at the very top, corporate employees tend to just be doing the bidding of the planners. About corporate marketing people I have said the following many times: Racers who get serious about sponsorship and really pursue corporate America are continuously blown away by how weak, if not stupid, many corporate marketing people are about marketing.

If it sounds like I am ranting, there is a method to my madness. I have been telling you all of this so I could tell you about a successful entrepreneur who is also a racer. I’ll call him Bill.  We talked recently about the marketing of his latest acquisition. Racing and sponsorship were not on our agenda, but occasionally we drifted into that direction, and Bill made some observations worthy of note because he is a prime example of how a genuine business person who loves racing views sponsorship. Here are his views about two prime issues:

TAX WRITE-OFFS
Bill’s company sponsors his race car and uses the sponsorship as a legitimate business expense. Bill admits that he is exploiting the tax advantage to finance his racing. He further acknowledges that the company logo on his car and trailer do virtually nothing for his business. Bill self-sponsorship exemplifies the tax write-off aspect of sponsorship that many racers believe compels companies to become sponsors.

From a business perspective, Bill knows his sponsorship is an irresponsible use of funds. He said that he would do no such deal with any other racer unless he could not race himself but wanted to hang out at the track. He also would never approve such a deal if one of his employees brought it to him under the guise of a marketing project.

Bill’s assessment of sponsorship is telling because it mirrors how, more and more, business people are viewing sponsorship that delivers nothing more than logo exposure.

The good news for those of you who want to continue pursuing grubstakes is that there still exist some companies that do write-offs and no account sponsorships; many occur when a lover of racing, or a complete dumbbell, works as a level where they can pour company money into a hole and not have to account for it.

A suggestion: Grubstakes still exist and someone might throw money at you. Just keep in mind that dependence of finding grubstakes season after season is a low percentage strategy on which to build your future.

LET’S SEE: WOULD I RATHER HANDOUT COUPONS OR HIT MY HEAD WITH A HAMMER?
Were Bill to sponsor another racer as a marketing move, he would expect a return on the investment. Ergo, his business mind tells him that a sponsor would expect the same from him. That would entail a lot of marketing-related activities for which he has no time. Consequently, he does not even want a sponsor.

At the same time, Bill is not so naïve as to think that all sponsorships are marketing projects. His experience has taught him that the majority of marketing people (consultants included) are clueless about how to sell a product AND make a profit. One of his best comments — actually, the one that prompted me to tell about him — was that he is sick of the marketing experts who come to his company and try to get him to do things that cost — instead of make — money; such as giving huge discounts in order to sell a product.

Bill’s views about both sponsorship and marketing people are valuable if you are looking for sponsors, because the typical sponsorship proposal contains “sponsor benefits” such as being able to distribute coupons at the races and via a “bounce-back” attached to the hero card.

Listen up boys and girls: Coupons are losers. They are crutches that weak marketing people rely on because they do not know how to build demand and preference for their products. Clue: At retail, almost all the chest-thumping about market share is a numbers-illusion perpetrated by marketers who move products by giving them away at reduced margins. If you want a marketing lesson, stand in the soda aisle at any grocery store and watch which cola moves off the shelves. It’s the one that is on sale.

The quantity of coupons distributed each year is astronomical. Some companies rely so heavily on coupons, and coupons are such losers, that the companies would be bankrupted if all their coupons were redeemed. The only thing that protects them is that coupons are extremely ineffective. What they are good for is that the redemption rate is fairly predictable, and so they can be used to clean out clogs in the distribution pipeline and keep the factory pumping out product.

Check this out: I buy sports nutrition bars. I have a couple of favorites and I buy a lot of them. They normally cost 99 cents apiece, but one brand is on special right now: For $2.99 I get four bars, plus one free, packaged inside a box that includes a dollar-off coupon for the next purchase of another box of four plus one free. That means I am paying 40 cents apiece. The worst part is that this brand is my second choice; I will stock-up and when they go off special, I will switch back to my first choice. Good move, marketing genius.

Like I said, marketing ain’t easy. But some of it is pretty simple to figure out. Next time you are compelled to tell a company that if they sponsor you they can hand out coupons at the track, you might want to step back and think a bit harder. Incidentally, most events will not allow you to hand out coupons, or anything else, unless you have a pre-arranged agreement. Oops, that could be trouble if your sponsor discovers they have to shell out another ten grand for the privilege of giving away their products.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Since 1980, Thomas Amshay’s firm, RFTS, developed marketing strategies for products and consulted on how to use sponsorship as a marketing tool. He is the author of dozens of books and articles about sponsorship and marketing. In 1999, Amshay reinvented his career and joined the e-commerce revolution full-time with the launch of www.SponsorShop.com – Where the business world shops for sponsorship and event marketing opportunities. E-mail him at ta@sponsorshop.com.

Article courtesy of Ernie Saxton’s Motorsports Sponsorship Marketing News, 1448 Hollywood Avenue, Langhorne, PA 19047. Phone: 215-752-7797, Fax: 215-752-1518 or on the web at www.saxtonsponsormarket.com. A one year subscription is $79.95.
 

END

 

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