Horse Racing Marketing

Open letter to RA/Phumelela/Gold Circle

Much gets said about marketing or lack thereof in SA Racing.
I personally find the whole approach very weak and at best confusing.

Weak and confusing are pretty much one and the same when looking at their approach to horse racing marketing. They seem to be stuck in three worlds

1 How to increase Gambling Revenue ?
2 How do I get new sponsorship into the industry?
3 How do I get new people into racing mainstream? That is Owners, Race goers and viewers.

Further to this they seem to have got stuck on who’ job it is to market which section of the business.
Option 1 clearly falls in P/GC hands but they are dependant on coverage and excitement to lure people away from other form of entertainment. They seem unsure whether to target the hardened gambler and extract more money through new products/ Venues/ Non Racing ventures. Most of these probably have not paid off as they are at best very weak options or badly marketed. Soccer Six being the exception.

Option 2 would seem to fall in the middle RA or P/GC but again does not seem to be a huge success or drive to lure new sponsorships. Most existing sponsors are people from inside racing i.e Owners/Breeders etc. This must surely be addressed and considered a major failure. I will cover BEE initiatives around this later.

Is RA responsible for Marketing option 3 or is it P/GC.
GC seem to be unable to decide if they are Western Cape based or Durban based business and as such don’t seem to market as one business.
RA are trying but seem to lack a person to take the business to the masses. We market to the already converted. Marketing is not just to keep existing Customers but to lure new ones as well.
What excited me last year wont work the this year. People expect new and exciting all the time. P in this area fall hopelessly short and GC although much better are again making it about a few weekends a year. You don’t survive with an annual client you need repeat business. People who tell people will grow this business.

So where to from here as our good friend Stan would say.

The three entities serve no purpose running marketing exclusive from each other. The brand called Horse Racing needs to be marketed with one voice. This does not imply that the businesses must merge operationally. But should rather go to market as one voice.
They need to identify their target market.
I guess they seem to target 65 and older as that is pretty much who is in racing and who sit in the elevation room week after week. My suggestion would be target YOUNG up and coming High earners.Black and White. Has the marketing department heard of the Black diamonds. I can tell you the elevation room has not hence the RA has not.
How to find these targets? Find where they are. Find what they like. Target their trends not 1970’s trends.
Where do you find these people? Black and white are in shopping malls not TAB’. They are Virgin Active Gym’ They are reading Cosmo. They are generally with a Medical aid firm that discovers things. They are at Edgars. They are in Mangoes that fly etc etc. They dont read the Citizen on a daily basis.
The need to find ways of telling this target market what Raicing is abbout.
That we are about Horses. We are about gambling. We are about entertainment. We are about welfare of animals. Etc etc.
How? Be in their face all the time. Make them think horse racing before they think Casino and Lotto.
Don’t keep marketing in the same place. A person who watches Tellytrack don’t need to know about the MET or the Queens Plate or Summer Cup or any other less important meeting. Tellytrack as a concept has completely lost the plot and should be revamped. Most unco-ordinated un-rehearsed thing i have ever seen. Efficiency is a Blue Marlin i guess to them.
Racing express is in the Citizen(Primarily Gauteng Paper) why not expand that to other daily national publications. Sowetan would be a good start. Same paper format and all. Give it to them for free.
BEE sponsorship. Where is it? Why don’t we have Mvelapanda, Harmony and such on board and many other not so big companies. These companies are not more or less important than non BEE companies but Racing needs to look to the future. Remgro is one of the most pioneering companies in the world has anyone from SA Racing asked the Ruperts for advise or guidance.

If Horse Racing gets Marketing correct all three worlds will collide and the business will go from strength to strength.

Thanks

Sly

Opinion Offered freely and without predjudice.

Nice post Sly. I have to agree with you 100%. I can report that I was at Scottsville 2 Sundays ago and noticed a lot of young white and black students enjoying a day at Scottsville. Quite a trendy bunch. Very encouraging eeven if it is on a small scale.

Live racing is infectious even if it is at a goat track. I would like to see more done as far as on track coverage is concerned especially on the big meetings. I noticed at the July that the big screen was quite far from the main grandstand and you ony really only catch the last 100 meters of every race when watching live action at the track. In the UK the screens are in front of the grand stand on the opposite side of the track, which adds to the viewing pleasure of the audience.

When an outfit like Phumelela turns over promotion to the Racing Association, that tells me everything I need to know, which is that they don't give a rat's ass about live racing, only their precious signal and gambling. They care only about their shareholders and very little about live racing. Instead of promoting the sport, they are sucking it dry.

Nayone for a merger?

Which begs the question Barry - why are so many encouraging a P/GC merger???

split 'em up. GC owns all the tracks and the pictures, gets some professional management/marketers who have to run the sport of racing properly to survive; P keeps the beloved betting as do the bookies their fixed odds, but all have to pay fairly to bet, advertise, sponsor, hospitality. split 'em up I say