Did You Know - 'Real' Sponsorships

How To Get Sponsors To Pay For Your Broke Ass To Go Racing

To understand motorsports sponsorships you first have to understand the business of professional motorsports. A race team is a business like any other business. It has expenses—cars, drivers, crew, equipment, logistical, office, accounting, so much coffee, etc.—and needs to bring in revenue to cover those expenses. Where we go off the rails is in how we bring in that revenue.

As you can see by just looking at various cars, in the various series around the world, there is no one type of company that has an interest in sponsoring motorsports. Red Bull, Rolex, Visit Florida, UPS, and Viagra have all graced the body panels of race cars all over the world. None of them have anything in common other than the value they, individually, see in racing.

But there are so many people out there getting it totally wrong that they actually turn potential sponsors off and screw it up for the rest of us. More importantly, if more potential racers start doing a better job pitching and working with sponsors, it helps bring more sponsors into racing, making the sport healthier and hence more attractive to other sponsors. So there is a method to my madness. 

Rule #2: B2B is how most sponsorships occur

One of the big myths of sponsorship is that it’s only about PR and marketing. To be fair, there is absolutely a marketing component to almost every sponsorship deal. However, the primary driving force behind most of these deals is B2B (Business to Business).

What is B2B? In short it’s the exchange of products, information or services between companies rather than consumers (which is known as B2C). B2B works thusly:

Company A has something that Company B wants. Company A says OK, you can have it, but it will cost you. Company B says OK what will it cost us? Company A says “Well, we have this race team…”
Look at a race car sponsored by a big box store, for example. The first thing you see is the big store logo everywhere. The logical assumption is that the store is writing some fat checks to be involved in that program.

But look again a bit closer. Do you see all of the other big name logos like Coke, Energizer, Belkin, Crest, Dove, and so on? What do you think all of these companies have in common?

Yes. Their products are all sold at that superstore near you.

The store wants to sponsor a race car program but doesn’t want to write a bunch of big checks all by themselves. So they go to some of their retail partners who have been asking for better placement and promotion for their product at their stores nationwide.

The company gets better exposure for their product, which directly translates into more sales and the store gets funding to sponsor their race team. Deal done.

(Jalopnik.com)