Blog Assignment: SNA to secure Sponsorship deal for a Racing Car Driver

Motorsports is an expensive sport. The drivers at grass root levels struggle hard to get sponsorship for their racing career. Higher series in motorsports such as F1 and NASCAR are popular enough to get sponsorship easily as the brands want to showcase themselves in front of the large number of viewers. With over 50 Million+ viewers for NASCAR racing, a primary sponsor pays $500,000 for sponsoring a race car. The drivers are heavily endorsed by leading brands and the marketing campaigns of the brands revolve around the celebrities.

 

        "Fastest billboards on Earth are Racing cars!”

However, at lower levels of motorsports, the drivers need to raise money for their drive and pay the teams. The money could be paid from the driver’s pocket or could be sponsored by a brand who wants to create awareness among the viewers of the racing series. Even such racing events do manage to pull good amount of viewers. The drivers can tap into the social networks of the fans and learn about their favorite brands. A Social Network Analysis can be undertaken for all these viewers. This will help to know the popular brands among the viewers. A driver or a team looking for sponsorships can approach these famous brands and request for sponsoring their races. This will be a win-win situation for both the parties, the driver receives the capital that is required to fund his career and the brands get their advertising to the customers.

          Sample Social Network Analysis data for Red Bull Racing team

     The figure above shows the social network associated with the Red Bull Formula 1 racing team. It shows the connection between the popular celebrities and famous brands. We can clearly see some famous celebrities, Movies, TV Shows, Games and rock bands. All these connections emerge out of ‘Red Bull Racing’ and the size of the font shows the Eigen vector values of the associated names. The more famous the name is, the bigger it appears in this chart. Products endorsed by these celebrities help the brand to get recognized and increases awareness among their fans and followers. Many products are developed and branded based on the social networks of the organizations. This huge cost ensures that the customers become aware of the brand. The high performance of this sport is also marketed by some top performing sponsor companies like Accenture, Red bull, L’Oreal, DHL, etc. These brands focus on reaching out to as many audiences they can. They launch marketing campaigns around the popularity of the sport.  In the Customer Funnel Analysis, this helps to achieve awareness and brand recognition among viewers. In the later stages, the customers feel good to be associated with top performing brands and their services. It also helps the brand to remain on top of the minds of the customers.

     SNA will help me to identify my possible sponsors. Social Networks have been very effective in build strong base of followers. It essentially helps to maintain brand value through the customer lifecycle value. Marketing strategists work with the network analysis data from all social media sites to capture the potential customers and promote their products. Advertising and brand awareness campaigns that run on Facebook, Twitter etc are a good way to keep the brand on the top-of-the-mind of the customers.  Paid media on social networking platforms has gone beyond the need of the user to comprehend what should the customer buy in the future. Every other day I see an ad from my favorite online shopping website selling me products that I recently browsed on the web.

    

     Required data will be:

      .       Full name (that can be searched on facebook)

      .       Brands that are frequently visited on a scale from 1 to 5

  

    Optional data:

      .      Favorite clothing brand

      .      Favorite shoe brand

      .      Favorite retailer

      .      Favorite Watch/Accessory brand