Will Racing Get A Fighting Chance?
I and many others have advocated the need to bring racing to a more diverse and younger audience and build much-needed new capacity for the sport.
While there are positive signs that racing is gaining additional exposure, such as in the form of programming now on SABC, it’s hard to see how this will translate into greater attendance without the help of a more entertaining range of products.
Leon Smuts writes in the Sporting Post mailbag that the ill-fated “Racing It’s a Rush” project could have been successful if supported by a more interactive, entertainment-oriented product lineup, but had almost no impact as there was no compelling reason to be involved in racing other than constant Repeating the same boring offer. I hope that new endeavors don’t follow the same path by ignoring innovation and doing the same things over and over again.
The importance of lively product entertainment, higher quality dividends and greater affordability as key product attributes that would make racing more attractive and marketable has to this day not been understood and pursued by any operator locally or internationally, while other sports have benefited immensely from making this important connection.
It’s disappointing that actively engaging new customers through product-centric marketing seems to have a relatively low priority, as I haven’t yet seen any evidence of implementing an actionable marketing plan and strategy.
Racing needs to build new capacity (Image – Candies Lenferna)
Given that marketing typically takes time to gain momentum and often faces significant delays before the benefits are fully realized, this is a task that should be started urgently, rather than delaying its adoption forever.
There seems to be a belief that with a few tweaks, many significant issues with racing will go away and that there is plenty of low-hanging fruit ready to be picked, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Racing has been on a downward trend for many years and this trend needs to be reversed by more substantial means, despite understandable but unfortunate financial constraints.
There is both a need and an opportunity to implement proper marketing strategies and move things in the right direction in a measurable way with clear goals, objectives and responsibilities, but will it happen?
It worries me that our operators do not seem to see the value of a much larger effort to introduce racing to a larger number of potential customers who could see the pools swell and racing become a household name again.
Why are efforts being put off and only limited intervention being made to grow the sport beyond the current customer base when the need to develop new markets for racing is so clear and crucial to ensure the well-being of the industry and its beneficiaries?
Do we keep doing the same thing and expect a different result? (Image – Chase Liebenberg)
Everything I have learned and experienced in marketing suggests that racing is calling for a separate supporting online offering so that the project can be delineated in terms of monitoring growth and granting operators access to vital information, some of which are listed below.
- Customer’s personal information (age, gender, geographic region, profession, etc.)
- regularity of participation
- Average expenses
- development in terms of skills
- Other product uptake and how long after initial involvement
- Country/Region/Course Preferences
- Number of new customers and speed of growth
Effective intervention requires an adequate upfront payment, but much-needed funding for a more modern custom platform and a new exotic product offering that will pay off in the medium to longer term, allowing significant profits for essentially the operators, but ultimately for all parties served by the live racing.
The funding model needs a sustainability boost, and the surest way to do that is through rapid and continued customer growth and further expanding the income opportunities from this source. A number of additional revenue opportunities could be found and customers would be willing to pay for them if the product and additional services offered tangible value for money.
Unless racing adopts a product-based dedicated marketing program any time soon, I cannot see how the sport will survive its aging customer base and the eventual and inevitable loss of many of its high-grossing customers.
Racing has an undeniable need for large-scale customer growth to offset this impending catastrophe that is approaching much faster than the sport can afford.
Big race days have different dimensions (Image – Candies Lenferna)
The collapse of racing, something previously unthinkable, would be a very sad day given the joy it has brought to its dedicated followers over so many years and the many who make a living from it every day and hope to continue to do so .
Racing can thrive in the right environment when given the support the sport deserves, but it requires the customer experience to be vastly improved from product to service to prominence.
Will racing finally get a chance to become attractive, popular and compelling to brand new audiences, or can the product and marketing be pushed further?