Formula One this year has been more exciting than any season the last decade; more overtaking, more small teams producing big results and a whole bunch of drivers in contention for the championship...

Not so long ago, the only reason you’d watch F1 would be to see how far ahead Schumacher would be at the end, but now it’s actually engaging. To be honest, I’ve like Red Bull Racing for a while. They were always struggling with the speed and reliability of the car, but still secured great drivers like David Coulthard, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber. They were everyone’s second favourite team...

Now, the car is fast, it’s getting more reliable and the team as well as both drivers are leading the world championship. Great for F1 and even better for Red Bull...

The team’s fortunes have taken a similar line to the Red Bull brand... Red Bull started out with a much smaller budget than the much larger beverage manufacturers and flew under the radar for some time doing differently, doing things their way. After a while, doing things differently started getting serious results and now the big boys are trying to catch up. For so long, Red Bull avoided all of the ‘must-do’ elements of the marketing mix that Coca Cola and Pepsi and countless others invested millions in each year. No print-ads, radio spots, no super-bowl ads...

Instead, they built a loyal following by sponsoring alternative sports, like skating, snowboarding, BMX and motocross; sports that, at the time, we relatively inexpensive to promote through. At the same time Red Bull was paying serious attention to branding... Vehicles, promotional material and even promotional staff are carefully selected and constantly monitored. You’ll never see Red Bull ‘co-sponsoring’ an event, because they are aware that they can’t control what other sponsors do, but some of the co-sponsors brand perception, positive or negative, will rub off on them. Most of Red Bull’s marketing mix is what you’d term “grass roots promotion”.

A novel idea when they started doing it; low-cost, localised stuff that wouldn’t usually garner nationwide press coverage, but lots of it. They would spread goodwill and free cans of red bull. What this did was give their brand national (and international) reach, but still be personal enough for their core market to not see them as a big bad corporate. You don’t see protestors at G8 summits burning effigies of yellow bulls. Instead they will be more likely be fuelled up on Red Bull while clashing with police outside McDonalds (probably due to the decline of the toys in the happy meals or something). Some lessons to learn from Red Bull’s marketing success:

• Be sure of your target market

• Keep firm control of your brand

• Make sure all interactions your customers have with your brand are positive

• Maintain consistent message throughout all marketing and promotional activity

• Be genuine and have fun

Go Mark Webber!!