China's auto market is experiencing unprecedented uncertainty.
New energy and intelligence bring uncertainty about the direction of technology, the incremental market becomes the stock market brings uncertainty about the driving force of consumption, the decentralization of traffic brings uncertainty about marketing reach, and the head-to-head competition between new power brands and traditional brands brings uncertainty about brand recognition.
Therefore, when the "Warring States Period" of the automobile market comes, car brands must find something certain in the uncertainty. Specific to the marketing link, it is necessary to let marketing find the common side of human nature. As a bulk commodity with a very high threshold of capital and professional knowledge, if you want to gain enough consumer awareness, a key word in marketing should be "cross-border breakthrough".
Then the question becomes, what kind of cross-border field should be chosen for the marketing of automobile brands to achieve a breakthrough? Sports may be a good direction. The rigid demand, universality, social attributes, and spiritual pursuit of sports are highly compatible with the automotive industry, and sports marketing has always been an important direction of automobile marketing.
The importance of sports marketing to the automotive industry is self-evident, but how to play sports marketing to maximize the effect? Last week, Tong Jiren Auto Review participated in the 2023 ECOTIME Sports Annual Conference, from which we saw a lot of sports marketing cases, resources and methodologies. The evolution of sports marketing will play an increasingly important role in the turbulent times of automotive brand recognition.
Sports marketing isn't just about bundling an IP
When you think of sports marketing, it's natural to think of big sporting events or sports stars. Indeed, over the years, most of the sports marketing of automobile brands has been highly tied to events and sports stars, such as event advertising sponsorship and athlete endorsements, which disseminate nothing more than homogeneous content such as love, dreams, champions, struggles, and struggles.
However, large-scale sports events are like a grand fireworks, although the implantation during the event seems to be able to get a lot of brand exposure, but limited by the timeliness of the sports event itself, the popularity of the high-cost smash may soon fall into the dilemma of no one remembering.
Some brands will choose to bet on athletes who may become popular after observing sports, and get traffic through their performance on the field. However, if the sports themselves are unpopular or do not have national attributes, then after the event technology, it will also face a rapid decline in popularity.
This kind of sports marketing is a battle of luck and a bet on the traffic that has become popular overnight, but it ignores the key link between car brands and sports - emotions.
The reason why sports can transcend people, races, and regions is, in the final analysis, that it can provide emotional values that match human nature at the spiritual level.
Here, we might as well observe a case of cooperation between car brands and sports platforms in 2023.
The NBA All-Star Game and the NFL Super Bowl have a huge audience in China, and they are also marketing resources that many auto brands hope to use. Tencent Sports owns the broadcast rights and sports brokerage business of these two major events in China, but most car brands stay on the brand exposure of Tencent Sports when they choose these two events for sports marketing. However, there is one car brand that has gained insight into the content trends of sports marketing and has made full use of Tencent Sports' resources, that is, Lincoln Motors and Tencent Sports' jointly customized road chronicle program - "Journey to Beauty".
This is a classic case of customized sports marketing content in 2023. The premise is that Tencent Sports not only owns the broadcast rights, but also has a series of resources such as sports leagues, sports teams, athletes, celebrities, commentators, and anchors for car brands to choose from. As a representative brand of American luxury cars, Lincoln in "A Journey to the United States", as the car of many professional football stars, in the form of travel experience + light interviews, experienced the top event culture with the audience, and felt the pure American culture. In this process, the combination of the IP of the event, the spirit of sports, and the Lincoln brand allowed Lincoln to reach more pan-sports people, and at the same time established brand awareness.
Therefore, it is not difficult to see that sports marketing, which can really exert long-term effects and make traffic fireworks continue to bloom, is not just a simple way to leverage the influence of sports IP, but to customize content with resources and deliver content with products under the joint effect of resources, content and products, so as to bring emotional resonance to the vast user base and ultimately trigger the recognition of the car brand.
In 2024, what kind of sports marketing do car brands need?
In the era of mobile Internet, users' attention has become fragmented and dusty. Users can watch the game anytime and anywhere, with a large number of content choices, and sports marketing at this time, if it is only close to the hot spots, will become "pepper noodles". Therefore, sports marketing must return to the people themselves and put emotional reach in an important position.
At this time, the in-depth customization cooperation between automobile brands and Internet sports platforms must be a major trend in sports marketing. Only in this way can the resources and products in the hands of the sports platform be turned into content that fits with the car brand, and then impress the target customers of the car brand. Resources, content, and products are all indispensable.
In his keynote speech at the 2023 ECOTIME Sports Annual Conference, Huang Yi, Senior Director of Tencent Sports, made a very vivid analogy for sports marketing. Sports marketing is like cooking, the Internet sports platform is the central kitchen, and various copyrights, event IPs, sports agents and other resources are raw materials. When there is a demand from the car brand, the central kitchen can use these raw materials to customize a recipe according to the taste of the target customer. Tencent's various product lines will become restaurants that serve food to customers.
This marketing model, in which raw materials are supplied in a unified manner, customized according to customer and user needs, combined with product characteristics, and then distributed by various product lines, has been proven to be an effective way in various top-level events in the past, and it is also the direction of sports marketing for automotive brands in 2024.
In this marketing model, the first step is to find resources.
In the previous case of cooperation between Lincoln and Tencent Sports, Tencent Sports, as an Internet sports platform, has not only the copyright of the broadcast of the event, but also the sports brokerage business covering sports teams and players, anchors, reporters and commentators. More resources means more possibilities for customizing content.
According to Huang Yi's introduction, Tencent Sports has prepared a number of copyright events in 2024, gathering the industry's top production and broadcasting teams and popular athlete resources, which can not only continue to launch innovative IPs, but also provide full-chain marketing solutions from athlete signing to sponsorship strategy and communication activation to meet the different marketing needs of brands.
2024 is a big year for sports, not only the top events such as the Olympic Games and the European Cup, but also vertical events that affect users in the circle, including the return of F1 to China, the private Winter Olympics X Games, and the rising influence of the NFL, tennis, and other vertical events that affect the circle of users. The former has a strong influence and can quickly increase brand exposure by targeting the general public, while the latter has a solid circle of users and can deeply reach the minds of the target group. Tencent Sports not only has the resources to stock up for this series of events, but also has the ability to gather different target groups and create a differentiated sports marketing experience.
The first step for different car brands to meet their own audience coverage and marketing needs is to find a sports platform like Tencent Sports that has broadcast rights and sports brokerage business, determine resources, and carry out customized marketing.
The second step is content co-creation
Content is the core of sports marketing, and what consumers want to see is the value of the events or athletes they follow and love, and the value of the car brand, which has emotional resonance, and the connection that can be deeply involved and interacted, rather than simply exposed.
Taking Tencent Sports as an example, in terms of content around the event, there are offline activities such as NBA stars' trip to China and "Impulse Party" during F1 Shanghai, as well as Cristiano Ronaldo's self-made content of the last European Cup, derivative programs with the event as the core, and original events for the public or teenagers. For example, during the 2023 FIBA Basketball World Cup, "Basketball Storm" produced by Tencent Sports is a popular basketball elite event composed of international superstars, college teams, grassroots label KOLs, and public enthusiasts. This is a case of relying on the copyright of a top event to create self-made content and conduct customized marketing with brands.
Good sports marketing content must be the business co-creation of the car brand and the key figures, key events and key occasions of the sports event, match the resources of the sports event, interact deeply with users, carry out cross-border activities on hot events, and the most important thing is to make the sports IP and the car brand connect at the user level through the content.
Once the resources and content are in place, the next step is to distribute the product.
The ultimate goal of resources and content is to become marketing that has a degree of communication, can be operated in the long run, and has a lasting impact. For example, in the Olympic Games, when Chinese athletes or teams win good results, hundreds of millions of users can receive real-time information push at the same time on multiple terminals and multiple Internet products, which is the embodiment of product power. The implantation of the automobile brand at this time can be highly integrated with the national glory and national pride, and realize the two-way rush of traffic exposure and brand tonality.
The whole process of sports marketing is actually a process in which the car brand and the sports platform take what they need and complement each other's advantages. Relying on huge resources and audiences, sports marketing is naturally easy to output high-quality content and create stories with emotional resonance. Therefore, auto brands need the resources and content of sports platforms to find users and touch the psychology of users, while sports platforms can truly revitalize their wide-area traffic by converting traffic into the scene of auto brands.
Write at the end
The threshold for sports marketing itself is not high, but when the links of the entire chain of sports marketing become more refined, this threshold will become very high. One IP, one player, and one solution can no longer meet the needs of sports marketing, and whether sports can become a link between car brands and users on the basis of wide dissemination, and generate a sense of identity, belonging and achievement, is the key to sports marketing.
Perhaps the era of incremental automobile consumption has passed, and the embodiment of the demographic dividend in the automobile market is getting weaker and weaker. However, it is precisely when automobile consumption enters the era of stock increase and purchase that the significance of automobiles to the social and spiritual level will become greater, which is the most important underlying logic for empowering sports marketing. The sports marketing of automobile brands is not only about which competition to sponsor and which athlete to find as a spokesperson, but also to be people-oriented and comprehensively attack in terms of resources, content and products, and to carry out in-depth customization and co-creation with sports platforms, so as to occupy a place on the high ground of sports marketing.