McLaren’s Allert Believes His Marketing Strategy Is A Winning Formula

Group brand director of McLaren Technology Group says the company is “becoming less siege-like” in terms of its levels of secrecy and engagement with the public.

For most people, the name McLaren is synonymous with Formula One, but the second most successful motor racing team in F1 history is only one part of the McLaren Technology Group.

The group also includes McLaren Automotive, which produces luxury, high-performance sports cars, and McLaren Applied Technologies, which applies the technical and R&D skills developed by McLaren in motor racing to companies outside the automotive world.

John Allert is group brand director of McLaren Technology Group. With a qualification in design and a background in brand strategy, he was chief executive of brand consultancy Interbrand in London before joining McLaren, then an Interbrand client, in 2007. He joined the group’s board in 2014.

He spoke to CMO.com recently, and the first thing I asked was what attracted him to McLaren.

Allert: What tempted me most was not the glamour of Formula One or any of that. It was the opportunity the brand had to do some extraordinary things. One was to enter the supercar market in a serious way. Another was to monetise and commercialise the brand in the technology sector.

CMO.com: What role does brand play in a business like McLaren?

Allert: I cut my teeth at Interbrand propagating lines like “Brand is the central organising principal of business.” It was really only in joining McLaren that it became evident that is exactly what McLaren is all about. In the same way as for Apple, there isn’t a part of the business that’s not driven by the brand. Although I’m not pompous enough to compare us to Apple, our growth in the technology sector is similarly driven by the truth of what we do and what our brand believes in, and that’s continuous innovation in technology to drive quantifiable benefits to engineering solutions.

Those engineering solutions for us were originally around making a racing car go faster. An obvious link then was making road cars more performant, and developing and nurturing technologies that facilitated that. Next came the identification of adjacent industry sectors where we could monetise some of that technology.

In some ways, that’s a crowded market because there are a lot of technology consultancies out there. What makes us different is that we have the theory, but we also have the practice. We can advise on process, but, equally, we go right through to manufacture of physical products. There are few businesses that actually do both of those things. Hence our success in those areas.

McLaren Applied Technologies is now two years into a pioneering long-term alliance with KPMG. Having developed jointly branded propositions in predictive analytics, organisational excellence, and financial advisory services, together we are working as one team with sector-leading brands in retail, energy, and utilities.

Our Applied Technologies business also now operates on the leading edge of the Internet of Things, developing technologies for applications as diverse as public transport networks, consumer wearables, and even household appliances.

We believe that brands are not infinitely elastic. You can’t stretch them into areas where they have no right to be. We’re very careful about what we do with the brand, who we partner with, and what challenges we take on. We pick very few fights, but the ones we pick we aim to win.

CMO.com: How is digital changing the way you think about brand and brand positioning?

Allert: For us there are two aspects. There is what digital necessitates us doing under the guise of our brand, and digital, therefore, permeates pretty much everything we do. It’s almost that our currency is digital. But, just as with any brand, digital also influences the way we market ourselves.

Our brand interfaces with a very disparate group of stakeholders—everybody from race fans, to supercar buyers, to governments, to employee groups, to media, and so on. Digital is a thread that runs through all those areas, but it’s not innovative in itself. Integrating digital now is no more innovative than broadcasting in colour. It’s no longer interesting to talk about whether you’re doing it or even how you’re doing it. It’s the effectiveness with which you’re doing it that matters.

CMO.com: How is marketing organised within McLaren?

Allert: We have two marketing organisations within this one business. One is very specialised around the sales and marketing of sports cars. The other is about rights marketing and sports marketing, and that is a team of about 60 people. A significant proportion of them are engaged in what we call media content and communications; they would have once been called a digital team. That’s really the engine room of what we’re producing, both with our sponsor partners, but also to support and promote our own brand.

CMO.com: We’re seeing that, as digital communication permeates the entire organisation, it changes relationships between functions. Have you observed that happening significantly within McLaren?

Allert: That’s absolutely the case with us. Our commercial model relies very much on a number of strategic co-branded relationships. For example, with KPMG we are working with our HR colleagues to deliver on our joint belief in the need to nurture young talent through apprenticeships and schemes that promote diversity and inclusivity.

So we work hand in glove with all of those different practice areas, right through to specialised areas like materials science or health and well-being. The red thread for us is our ambition to manifest our brand as an innovator through all of those different relationships. Then digital is the currency that carries that, rather than the means by which we’re seeking to achieve it.

CMO.com: Does this take you towards different organisational models?

Allert: We operate as a federation of companies within a group structure. The only way that can work is for us to be united by our vision and our ambition for what our brand can achieve. As a result, that federation actually has very transparent walls. The culture is very fluid and we’re respectful of each other’s specialisms. We come together almost in SWAT teams to surround an issue or an opportunity and determine whether it’s one for us and, if it is, to determine how to prevail in that particular opportunity.

CMO.com: What does the skills profile of marketers at McLaren look like? How has that changed over the past few years?

Allert: I’m reluctant to say they’re more generalised in their skill sets, but they are certainly more generalised in their thinking. They need to be hugely adaptive people who thrive, not just in a performance-driven environment, but in an environment that values quantification. For marketers, that’s not always an environment that they are attracted to, or prosper within. So we attract a very particular marketing mind. They’re the kind of people who thrive on proving themselves every day and trying to do better tomorrow. They are difficult to find, but with the environment and culture that we have here, they’re reasonably easy to retain.

Our issue is that our brand is a magnet to a lot of different people, but our culture just doesn’t work for a lot of people—it’s an imposing culture, it’s demanding. It’s not for everyone, but for those for whom it does work, it really works. To that end, we are culturally more like a cause than a corporation.

CMO.com: What are the challenges you face as an organisation?

Allert: One of the big challenges we have is to resist the temptation to try and boil the ocean. The opportunities for our brand are many and varied, but picking the right fights is critical because we don’t have infinite resources. We are somewhere between being a big small company and a small big company. That means that we have to be very efficient in how we approach business opportunities.

We also have a challenge around the war for talent, as does everybody. That’s not just around finding the cleverest people, it’s also making sure that we live up to our own expectations around diversity and inclusivity, and that we continue to be able to support the local community and all those sorts of things. These are tensions in many different businesses, but a business such as ours, that plays on a public stage like Formula One, is open to being judged by people.

CMO.com: All brands are under much more scrutiny than ever before. What are the key lessons that McLaren has learnt from being in the public gaze?

Allert: We learnt the principles through the early days of social media, engaging with consumers in a more immediate way than we ever had before. A lot of it is around authenticity and relevance.

We are opening up to the world bit by bit and becoming less siege-like in terms of our levels of secrecy and engagement with the public, and it’s important that we don’t act as a paternal brand. That means we have to be relevant and interesting to people who we serve as a brand, in B2B markets as well as through the way we interface with someone who is interested in buying one of our cars, right through to a fan who wants to buy a cap or a t-shirt.

When I say we can’t be paternalistic, that means engaging with people as people. As a marketer, I’ve never believed that people are consumers. They are people and you need to treat them as people. I never think of myself as a consumer. I never think of myself as having relationships with brands. It’s presumptive to think that people are having a relationship with your brand. We are serving people and we need to remind ourselves of that sometimes. Sometimes brands and the people managing them make the mistake of thinking they have a greater role in the world than they really do.

CMO.com: What are your next steps in developing the brand?

Allert: We are still expanding into what we think is our current opportunity, and that probably takes us to five years out. For example, we, as a sports car brand, have already overtaken a brand like Lamborghini that has been in the market for a long time. We aren’t arrogant enough to think that we can topple a brand like Ferrari, but we’re certainly intent on giving them a nosebleed. We are on the public record as saying that we’re going to invest billions in the development of new car models over the next five to 10 years.

We just want to be seen as a global, but proudly British, hi-tech brand that creates amazing products and technologies that improve the world.