President’s blog
By Paul Dixon
Racing must connect with the unconnected
February 2010
The Racing For Change initiative must break through consumer apathy, from students to city high-flyers, as only new custom will see sport grow.
The hugely important Racing For Change programme has made a good start.
There will always be those who carp at innovation but the extensive press coverage during the first icy weeks of the New Year was largely favourable.
We must not be perturbed by an apparent failure to get our message across to a few racing journalists and broadcasters.
We should disregard those who complain we are merely tinkering at the edges and hammer home the message that this was just the first stage of a long and exciting journey.
Certainly, the first set of Racing For Change recommendations are important, but should not be viewed in isolation. Inevitably, more substantive initiatives will go to the very heart of this multi-faceted and conservative industry, requiring a balancing act that coaxes the established horse-racing fan to accept change while at the same time capturing the imagination of a new audience.
Strands connect the many subjects now being discussed. Of the first set of proposals, for instance, the decimalisation of betting odds, which has received so much coverage, is closely connected to Racing for Youth.
Quite simply, anybody under the age of 30, and probably much older, is going to be much more familiar with decimals than they are with fractions and this represents just a tiny example of how, if racing is going to connect with a new young audience, it must be prepared to make changes.
The thrill of going racing, the fun of placing a bet, of being part of a social club of young owners – these are the sort of things that we have to convey to the millions of young people who today remain oblivious to our sport.
Racing also has to work on being a magnet for yesterday’s university graduates. These are the people who are the most attractive to advertising and marketing executives because they have a high level of disposable income.
Indeed, it remains a mystery that racing largely missed out on the great financial buoyancy that, until two years ago, surrounded the City of London.
Those times will surely return and when they do racing must be ready to seize the opportunity of captivating young men and women who effectively bet for a living and for whom the cost of having a racehorse in training would make a very small dent on their annual income.
In advertising and marketing, you have to break through consumer apathy.
Racing will only do this if it can deliver clear, easy-to-absorb messages that make an impression generally, but particularly on the young and, to put it in marketing speak, the upwardly mobile.
Then our sport would have the ammunition to obtain, for example, higher levels of sponsorship and corporate entertaining, two areas that are of crucial importance to racecourses. And, in theory at least, what is good for racecourses, should be good for the other constituents in racing.
The racing industry should be especially aware of these points when we come to the huge unfolding discussion about the funding of fixtures and premier racing. It is here where the industry is going face its sternest test. Here the future will pivot on whether racing is going to put its foot down and reject almost all of the proposed changes to our existing premier race structure or whether it will embrace the bigger picture.
Of course, none of us could stand by and watch 250 years of British racing’s heritage and tradition being thrown out, but, at the same time, an unwillingness to accept change will surely see a slow decline that might have equally disastrous consequences.
With any sport it is the major events in which the best compete that attract the biggest audiences. It is right, therefore, that racing’s Group/Grade 1 events will receive the most attention from Racing For Change. When these events are run, where they are run and the structure created to support them are the essential elements now being put under the microscope.
The word “narrative” has become a derided cliché but it nevertheless aptly describes what is required – a story with a start, middle and end to which a big and exciting label is attached saying “this is the best”.
Nothing could be simpler you might think. But not in racing.
Racing is about the horse and with horses you can’t create a Formula 1-type structure where the same competitors continue to meet until a champion emerges. It is for Racing For Change to find the answer.