McLaren Fan Engagement Case
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to attend a keynote talk about the Fan Engagement case of McLaren. Prior to that, I would like to thank McLaren and Havas for sharing their story and for allowing me to write a blog and share some pictures from the presentation. Let’s dive together and learn about their stories!
The keynote talk started with Mr. Bloom and Mr. Peddie, Digital Director of McLaren Group and Executive Creative Director of Havas Helia, on how an automotive company focused heavily only on-track performance has managed to become a more fan and eCommerce friendly brand. The first thing that triggered my mind as a common challenge is the diversity of people that follows the brand due to the 3 sub-brands that are included by the group.
Automatically, that means that engagement with each group should be different. Opening the brand especially to Formula 1 fans was a tough but rewarding challenge as they mentioned. As a closed brand, the operations team was always getting a high positive mark but for fan engagement historically there were not a lot of indications. As it was mentioned, the matter of connectivity in today’s world is a key to unlock the eCommerce engagement with the different customer groups.
The challenge of changing was real as Mr. Bloom mentioned as the world is constantly changing and moving fast while embracing the whole group. Being in the sports industry, he mentioned the example of City Group, which gives great behind the scenes access or the Amazon movie that they have created and launching some cool digital products. That is a result of how social media has impacted our daily life as customers and brands. The first pivotal step to move forward was the content strategy. It was highlighted that even the content pieces can be cool if it does not resonate with the targeted fans it won’t drive any results. It is all about the STORY and not only how McLaren performs every year in 20 races around the world. It is not about how many partners you may have to your Formula 1 car; it is about what the McLaren brand really means.
Heritage and story are part of the brand and also doing bold moves around the content strategy such as the vision of 2050 and how the races might look like led to change the way of approaching a car launch campaign as a big sponsor and media event to a fans’ event. A great example was last year’s campaign where some fans had the chance to see the new Formula 1 car before the event the official launch day.
A key impressive figured that it was mentioned: 500k followers to almost 10m followers in less than 7 years. A key outcome that resonates from the figure is that you must invest in your own channels and your own content strategy. How that happened; was in partnership with Havas which also assist them to build new digital products.
To begin with the basics on that, every channel needs to have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Giving purpose to everything matters and the starting point of this strategy was through the website with unique content from people that work for the organization. A great given example is the live commentary that exists every time there is a race, where a person sits inside pits listening to the internal communication between driver and his mechanics with translation in Spanish due to the big audience. In addition to that, the interactive live track map and the use of Instagram for behind the scenes content. The use of YouTube for long-form content while Twitter is all about the buzz. It is content dedicated to McLaren fans.
The car launch event had its own special meaning for the brand because it gave the fans the opportunity to get involved and be part of the story and have access to the team and drivers. To me, that is the epitome of a part of fan engagement.
This openness and engagement with fans have helped McLaren to be more relevant to the current status of fan engagement and to be more interesting from the side of sponsorship. For McLaren and partners, it is all about how to better storytelling and access to the fans by connecting with the content strategy. Despite this success, it was highlighted that the lack of performance on races has not allowed them to reach the maximum results and potentials but in an overall of the last 7 years the outcome is positive, and they keep pushing the boundaries forward.
A key element that pushed the whole group to be more efficient and active was when Liberty Media acquired the Grand Prix races. It gave them the ability to do more cool engaging stuff inside and outside the track and this because of the lifting the ban of limited access to filming during the races. It is a bold truth from a sports marketing perspective that in order to be relevant and engage a young generation audience they had to loosen up their restrictions. The result was that the more access you give to the fans the more the appetite grows and the more band a brand can create with them. McLaren’s aim was to create one to one relationship and connection with their fans and be able to capture more data, it was clear that only social media will give the access but also the creation of digital products.
A challenge that with the help of Havas was interesting to step up for McLaren Group. Building an App for McLaren fans was one key project as Mr. Peddie mentioned. Even though anybody can be a massive Formula 1 fan, he mentioned that no one doesn’t know all the details from a technical perspective. Working and understanding the fans was the key solution. Creating an initiative called McLaren + and reaching out and involving more than 8k fans with a customer survey, gave them all the necessary information they needed.
They selected what features they wanted to see so basically it was an App for them, made by them. The brief of the whole project was one world “HYPE”. It is driven by the desire of the fans and the adrenaline that races are given. From a marketing perspective, it is an easy way to communicate with both brands and make it much easier to make the project to be signed off. The content strategy was a vital aspect for creating the buzz around the App, but the most important was to give the chance to the McLaren members to create content by using their mobile phones and showing some of their daily tasks. Obviously, that created credibility and authenticity around the content. Prior to the launch, they went back to the group and they asked them to be “test drivers” of the App and to give a sense of enjoyment and create the feeling of belonging to the brand. The PR that resonates from that action was massive if you think that the App was not even launched. In addition, keeping the “HYPE” word, they realized the App in the iconic Grand Prix in the UK at Silverstone.
So, what’s next?
As Mr. Bloom highlighted, it has been a journey in order to understand the fans and give them the notion about what is McLaren brand. Another element was to bring the partners alongside to join the story and ultimately what McLaren aims is to change somehow the sports. Joining the Indie car racing and focusing more on eSports and across the wider group, they try to unveil all the potential opportunities and cross the boundaries to do more access to relevant stuff and brand warmth.
Closing the article, I think that what McLaren creates from a content strategy perspective is very rich without knowing where it is going to lead in the future, while the publishing aspect seems to be exciting from a storytelling perspective. Finally, from a commercial perspective, they have been more attractive to sponsors, building their community and growing their fan base globally. As was mentioned, there is always a commercial underpinning such as more traffic and other numbers but ultimately what McLaren wants is to be the brand where the value proposition, the heritage, and the tech proposition are connected. Looking forward to the outcome of the next brief in partnership with Havas.
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