McLaren joins the branding race with new recruit
McLaren is always chasing after Ferrari. They've chased after them on the track for decades, and sometimes they catch up. They've chased them on the road, trouncing the F40 with the McLaren F1 supercar, but missing the mark somewhat with the SLR. But in the modern era where racing is only half of competition, McLaren is after Maranello on another front: branding.
Marketing is one area where, even more so than on the circuit, Ferrari has got the rest of the field beat. But McLaren is getting serious about that front of the competition, too. To that end, McLaren is retaining the services of John Allert, a leading marketing consultant and former CEO of Interbrand. Are McLaren-branded laptops and theme parks far behind? Too soon to tell, but expect to see the name – and maybe a recognizable logo – showing up more prominently in the near future.
Does all this sound completely frivolous, bearing no effect on actual racing? Not so fast. With the stands at nearly every grand prix painted with fans wearing red, Ferrari acquires for themselves something of a home-field advantage at every race, all the while raking in serious profits that can go back into the development of new technologies to edge out the competition on the track. It's a winning formula for Ferrari, and in F1, nobody retains that kind of exclusive for long.
[Source: GrandPrix.com]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Nick 8:54PM (2/26/2007)
Ferrari also has another big advantage- affordable and plentiful gear. By partnering with Puma you can get official Puma team replica shirts for around $80. McLaren doesn't make the team replica shirts easily available, and when they do they're a whopping $600. The F1 crowd is a pretty finicky bunch and the unavailability of genuine licensed gear would be a good place to start for them. $600 for team replica shirt is too much. There are plenty of Mercedes shirts, but the Hugo Boss stuff is expensive and all but missing.
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Nick 11:43PM (2/26/2007)
Zee Germans will never have the home field advantage in F1. Europeans know their history oh so well, and they remember Pearl Harbor....
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Richard 6:41AM (2/27/2007)
Ha! This guy has a very difficult job!
McLaren have to figure out whom they actually are.
Undoubtedly, this guy will lead them down the road of mid to high-end accessorizing. More Voda-phones, black silk shirts, leather covered beer-steins with pewter McLaren logos.
What are McLaren? English (Bruce McLaren was a New Zealander)? German? Euro?
Their marketing platform is F1 and that is a problem. They are very firmly entrenched in F1 as the "not-Ferrari" team. Their cars haven't lasted an entire race with consistency in several seasons and they dress in shiny, tight black pants and skin-tight t-shirts like a bunch of neo-Nazi sissy-boys. They act that way as well: David Coulthard was essentially emasculated there per his new-found style and outspokenness at Red Bull and new arrival Fernando Alonso has cropped his locks to look like a corporate buffoon, not the charging bull who is Spain's first World Driving Champion.
Ferrari - OTOH - are all about passion. Red is their color and always has been. Everybody gets what that means immediately. What is the black and silver, now black and "pewter." They should go back to Orange, which was the color Bruce McLaren painted his cars. They should try to be something, not everything "not-Ferrari." How far did Avis ever get as "not-Hertz?"
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mike 12:01PM (2/27/2007)
"McLaren is always chasing after Ferarri"???? WTF???
HA HA HA!!!
Funny how "fans" quickly forget the 80s and the 90s!!
For those 20 years, Ferrari was chasing McLaren and Williams. They were the absolute pits!
Yeah, yeah, surely someone will bring up that Ferrari has wone the most GP races and titles compared to McLaren, but I should remind you that Ferrari has been racing GPs longer than McLaren - so obviously they would lead in those stats!
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