Rallye Sunseeker - Marketing

Hi again, today I’m going to go briefly over the marketing conducted by the Rallye Suneeker. I will aim to keep text to a minimum and give as many examples as possible! I’m going to finish up by giving a quick comparison between the marketing of Rallye Sunseeker and Cisco Live, I will identify the differences in their visible marketing and put forward some opinions on why these are.

First of all I will show some of the similar marketing techniques that the Rally has shown to Cisco:

Such as…… Twitter!

One of their most used mediums for marketing is Twitter, to date they have posted 748 tweets to their 541 followers. One interesting trait that they have taken up is to follow back anyone who follows their page, such as me!

I think this is an interesting example of the ‘Feedback’ stage of the communications process model in action. Rallye Sunseeker want to know what sort of people are following them, so what better way than to monitor their followers everyday use of Twitter, something that many people use to voice their opinions on all aspects of their day to day life. This could also be effective because by following people who have already shown an active interest in the Rally they know they are monitoring the correct audience for their event.

Media

Recently I utilised Google’s ‘Alerts’ feature to follow any news found on the Internet about Rallye Sunseeker, I chose to receive the emails as soon as the news was posted in an effort to see how often it is being reported on. The results were very positive with 28 emails being sent to me in the space of 9 Days, many of these emails contained more than one piece of news. This shows that as well as marketing directly to their target audience they are taking part in promotional activities and liaising with the media to boost their image.

A screenshot of all the email's I received regarding Rallye Sunseekers media activity 

'Sponsors and Friends' 

Other areas that we see the Sunseeker Rallye appear are through almost all of their ‘Sponsors and Friends’ websites, in the advertising section of their website they dedicate a page to this with an image and link each.

From looking at these stakeholders we can see they are varied and cover all different sectors. For example ranging from ‘Premier Foods’ to ‘Spearmint Rhino’, one thing they all have in common is that they are almost all local or in some way associated with the Bournemouth/Poole area.

Although I have not been able to travel down this year in the past I have also seen posters advertising the Rallye in the local area, these were in the High Street and on lampposts. This twined with the local sponsors and friends I think shows how the Rallye tries to bring the community together, I think it plays on the fact that it is bringing big rally names to a local area and uses it as a selling point to encourage locals to attend.

I think from the small amount of research I have shown today that we can fairly say that the advertising of the Rallye Sunseeker and Cisco Live are very different, yet very similar. It is obvious that Rallye Sunseeker advertise to the public and Cisco Live advertise to Business, this leads to different paths of marketing and but ultimately the same goal, to gain interest and sales of their product, which in this case is the event.

In my next post I am going to talk through the differences in Business to Business and Business to Consumer marketing, and demonstrate some examples of where this can be seen in my two events, for now I will leave you in peace……