The Art of Selling: Sponsorship 101
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The Art of Selling: Sponsorship 101
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By David Cameron, Italy
Atlas F1 Magazine Writer
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Table of Contents includes links to each chapter
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The paddock is seemingly awash with technical spies, people who spend their time looking into and assessing new technical innovations on competitor's cars with a view to stealing the idea for their own team. All of the major team principals have complained about this practice at some time, and yet it persists to this day. Given this, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that there are financial versions of these people, whose job is to look into potential deals being done with a view to breaking into it to their own end.
"I'm sure there are - one of the things we learnt some time ago is not to take potential sponsors to races because word gets out very quickly that such and such a team are entertaining company X. They may not go around with branding of that company on their clothes, but you tend to find out; you tend to find out through a hotel room or a plane ticket or something." Given the vast sums of money needed to run a team competitively, there must be a lot of temptation to try and step into someone else's deal, but Wright insists that it is not necessary: "In the first week of working with Frank he said to me, 'if you're as good as I think you are, you will never take a sponsor from another team', and that quite surprised me, but then it shouldn't do because he's come from the bottom and he had sponsors stolen from him.
"That said, if a sponsor was looking to move on we would make a play for them, but we would have to prove to Frank they are definitely out of wherever they are, that they're going. "One such case was FedEx, which had been with Ferrari for three years, and we knew that Vodafone was coming in and we'd heard that FedEx, Telecom Italia, Mobile and Tic Tac were all being squeezed out. So on that occasion we said to Frank 'look, they are out of Ferrari and we want to make a go for them', and he said 'okay, fair enough'. And we went for FedEx and we got them. So that's fair game. But approaching a sponsor that is with another team and under contract, we would not do." Is this just case of being holier than thou, or is it a case of there being an unwritten rule that all teams won't approach existing sponsors? "I think other teams would, and they do - our sponsors get approached fairly regularly by other teams, and we know about it. But as long as you're doing a good job and looking after that sponsor then there's nothing to fear. "There are other occasions when a sponsor decides to come into Formula One and then goes shopping within the paddock, and that's normally when an agency is involved and the agency will walk them up and down the pitlane. But it's a pretty undesirable situation, because there will inevitably be other teams who offer them more branding, or a cheaper package for the weekend. "Quite honestly, if that happens, my approach would be to say 'look, we're the wrong team for you because if you're comparing 50% of a Jordan with 20% of our cars then we haven't sold the value of coming with us properly, or you haven't understood that'. I'm not being derogatory there to Jordan, but clearly teams that haven't had the same success are not getting the same kind of share of voice" - the term used to denote the amount of timed exposure for the car on television during a race - "and if you've got a team that are getting five or six percent share of voice and you've got 50% of that car, is that better than having 10% of a car that is getting 17-18% share of voice?" But it's not just the sponsors of existing teams that Wright will refrain from pursuing. There are many potential sponsors not in Formula One that are clearly going to be inappropriate for a team, but further to that there are others that will not be accepted by the team's partners and have been laid down as such in contracts. "Referring to our BMW agreement, there are a number of product categories that we've said we're not going to touch, and that's in our contract - number one is tobacco, because we declared that we didn't want to be with tobacco and BMW doesn't want to be with tobacco; hard liquor - beer is a soft drink in Bavaria so that's fine! - but we would never sign a hard liquor contract. "The obvious ones - pornography, religion, that kind of stuff - those we obviously won't touch. Then you get into the theoretic marketing associations where you say: is it appropriate for a company of this nature, selling these types of products; does this fit with the kind of image we've created here? What we've created here is a portfolio of sponsors who are industry leaders in their sectors, and if you then went into another business sector and took a company who were right down the bottom end, would that fit? So you might then say no, it doesn't make sense. So that becomes more theoretical then." But what of legitimate companies who are market leaders but may lead to the other sponsors having philosophical problems with the link? It's a grey area, and as such Wright would err on the side of caution: "Let's say Viagra. We'd probably say that's not right, and that would probably cause offense to some of the other sponsors, so we wouldn't do it. "And again, I'm going to use Jordan as an example: at the height of the Benson & Hedges sponsorship and when they had tits and bums draped all over the car, I think you'll find that MasterCard said 'we don't like this, this isn't right for us, it isn't fitting the image that we are trying to portray', and MasterCard left. But I guess Eddie has to say it was right for Benson & Hedges, that's what they wanted to do, they were the bigger sponsor - some you win, some you lose."
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"Frank, probably only with Ron Dennis, has a real feel and responsibility for the sport and for Formula One, and you see them on many occasions talking about this, and about the sport as a whole. Frank genuinely doesn't want to see the small teams suffering by us pulling a sponsor from them to our team.
