(Guest post from Mark Martin)

Formula One is massively popular, with a global audience of over 600 million people. The sport has made household names of the likes of Nigel Mansell, who is still managing to capitalise on his association to the sport fifteen years after his retirement in the latest advertisements for Moneysupermarket car insurance.

However, the popularity of the sport has also been one of its problems, as fans haven’t been unable to get the access to the sport that they desire. It simply isn’t possible to give every fan at the circuit a tour of the paddock before the start of the race. Critics have therefore called the sport too isolated, and questioned why it can’t be more open to the public like the popular American racing series NASCAR. However, this is all changing thanks to social media.

Followers

The majority of F1 teams now have a Twitter account, where fans can follow their day to day activities. There is a huge hunger for this in the information age, and F1 fans are enjoying the increased accessibility of the sport. Fans now actually feel more emotionally involved with the teams, which increases the chance of them watching all the races to see how their ‘friends’ are getting on.

            Of all the teams, Virgin Racing appears to have embraced this new phenomenon the most as they strive to affiliate themselves within the F1 community and gain the support of fans. Tweeting about the strategy of the team, the work of engineers and mechanics, and commenting on goings on in the F1 world has allowed the fans to actually feel involved with the team and allowed them to get to know its ‘personalities’. Virgin Racing presently has 21,914 Twitter followers, each of which the teams are trying to make feel like an additional team member.

Brand personality

This all links to changes in the world of marketing, with ‘integration’ being the new marketing buzz word. Marketing academic, Terence Shimp, believes that sports marketing is overcrowded which leaves many sponsors logos un-noticed. On top of this, Shimp believes that the sponsorship association will do more harm than good if the brand and the team stand for different things.

A perfect example of this was Virgin’s decision to enter F1 for the first time in 2009 with the Brawn team. Branson had previously appeared unwilling to make the jump into the sport, but Brawn GP was the perfect opportunity for him. The team had been owned by Honda, who sold the team just before Christmas in 2008 leaving them on the verge of collapse. At the last minute, the team Principal Ross Brawn persuaded Honda to sell him the team for $1, meaning that Honda didn’t have to pay to make all the employees redundant.

The team quickly redesigned their car and managed to bolt a Mercedes engine in the back of a car designed to accommodate a Honda. This redesign meant that the car didn’t run for the first time until two weeks before the start of the season, and no one rated their chances as surviving the season without going bankrupt would be an achievement. However, Brawn had given up developing the team’s poor 2008 car early in the previous season and decided to focus all the teams’ resources on 2009.

The result was a car which was in a different league from that of their competitors and Brawn went on to win six of the first seven races with Jenson Button, and eventually sealed the world championship. Brawn GP were the underdogs, fighting for survival while at the same time fighting against the sports establishing winners. Branson realised this on the eve of the opening race of the season in Australia and decided to sponsor the team. Brawn perfectly correlated with his Virgin brand’s own underdog persona, which stemmed from Branson’s own life story. This involved him setting up his own catalogue firm and eventually turning this into a multi-national company spanning multiple industries despite being dyslexic and being failed by the schooling system in his childhood as a result. In each of these industries, Branson had entered a domain dominated by certain key players and took them on with a smaller budget.

This underdog persona had won him many fans and endeared the Virgin brand to customers around the world. Brawn GP perfectly complemented this underdog image. However, Ross Brawn sold the team to Mercedes for 2010 and the team hired the seven times world champion, Michael Schumacher. As the reigning world champion team with the most successful driver in the sport in one of their cars, Brawn were no longer the underdog and being associated with them would simply pollute Virgin’s underdog persona.

Branson therefore took the decision to start his own team from scratch for 2010, which would run on the smallest budget in the sport and become the first team in history to design their car with only computers. Once again, Branson had found a way to complement the underdog persona of his brand, by fighting larger teams with more experience and bigger budgets.

            Virgin are not the only company to have realised the benefits of owning your own F1 team to ensure increased publicity and better correlation to image. Kingfisher (Force India), Air Asia (Lotus), Red Bull and Mercedes Benz have all gone down the same route in recent years.

What does Twitter have to do with it?

As was previously outlined, Twitter allows followers to get to know the ‘personality’ of teams. If the team is created in a brands image, this personality will therefore provide a marketing message to the follower by showing exactly what the company stands for. Never ones to miss an opportunity, Virgin have used this to great effect this year. Fans have become emotionally involved with the team as they have got to know them and therefore become emotionally involved with every Virgin company in the different industries in which they are involved.

Formula One sponsorship is no long sufficient if it is just a logo on the wing of a car, it has to mean something and be acted upon with additional activities such as this to show people what message you are trying to achieve from the sponsorship. Virgin is the perfect case study in how F1 sponsorship can still