It seems even the richest sport in the world, Formula 1, has difficulty communicating with the media and its stakeholders:

Joe Saward: Today’s team in trouble is…

I think its odd that a sport/business so reliant on sponsorship money should have trouble communicating with interested parties. In the F1 microcosm image is everything – look at Renault F1 Team and how the press has vilified them following the “crashgate” scandal (with good reason I hasten to add). Did the protagonists take into account the damage that the whole plot could do to their parent company and by association all the other sponsors that they rely on for their funding? As it turned out the very same parent company pulled it out of the bag. I believe that Renault’s integrity has largely remained intact due to their swift action to distance themselves and the rest of the team from the people involved.

The multinational corporation was publicly seen to prune away the bad stuff, and thus turn what could have been a huge PR disaster into much less of one. The team will now rise from the ashes of crashgate as an entity much more under French control, rather than the autonomous entity that went before.

In the post linked above, Joe Saward discusses the lack of effective communication from the new teams struggling to make it to the grid for 2010. I wonder whether the engineers at the various companies are reticent to tell the world about their developments for fear of letting their rivals in on their secrets. But that is obviously short-sighted. For a business dominated by external and sponsorship funding, giving the right impression is everything. A communication black-hole makes people nervous. Being able to communicate honestly and positively with the people that can influence whether your business or venture will succeed or fail seems like a non-brainer to me.

Whether it be through traditional media, PR or social networking, and whatever the situation businesses find themselves in, ceasing communication with the outside world can only make that situation worse. Whatever the challenges of the present or the future, businesses that succeed are those that are able to convey a positive message to the right people, because it will always be far easier to destroy a reputation than create one in the first place.

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Tags: briatore, business, communication, crashgate, formula 1, marketing, piquet, PR, renault, reputation, sponsorship, strategy

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under tmd Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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