Customer engagement in Formula 1 : From an old man’s club to social media behemoth

Abstract: Formula 1 is one of the worlds biggest sports, and in the recent years they as a sport has had one of the biggest upswing in the world in their viewership and activity on social media. Instagram has played a big part in this recent success and is the sporting organisations fastest growing social media. Formula 1 themselves claims that their marketing and engagement strategy is focusing on the digital mediums and that engagement from their fans has been achieved. The purpose of this study is to look at what extent Formula 1’s marketing strategy can be defined as customer engagement marketing and what specific characteristics can be identified as engagement marketing. This study has looked at Instagram posts published by Formula 1 during specific time periods each year from the year 2015 to 2021. Instagram is Formula 1’s fastest growing social media forum, and was therefore chosen to be studied. The time period covers the before and after the American media company Liberty Media bought Formula 1 in 2017, giving an interesting insight on the consequences of the media company’s marketing strategy. Using content analysis the posts have been coded into variables and then categories, determining which marketing strategy that is present in each post. The content analysis was designed according to a theory defining what customer engagement is and what different marketing strategies a firm can use to achieve it, customer engagement marketing. The result shows a strong presence of customer engagement marketing, and in many variables show an increasing trend from the years after Liberty Media bought the sporting organisation. The findings from the content analysis can therefore affirm that Formula 1’s own claim about focusing on fan/customer engagement is true on the social platform of Instagram. The findings further show that creating engagement marketing with a strategy of building relationships between fans, drivers and teams of the sport has been the most important for Formula 1. Further, feeding information towards the fans and making it easier for them to keep exploring and venture deeper in to various parts of the sport have shown to be important. This study aims to be a contribution both as a methodological resource and example for research using content analysis on social media, especially on a sporting organisation. But also as a contribution to the fairly new research area of engagement marketing on digital platforms by sporting organisations. Therefore it could be of interest to researchers that wishes to study the subject, or people working with marketing. The case of Formula 1’s recent success could be looked further into by other sporting organisations, with this report as a way for deeper understanding on parts of the process.