The comeback trail: How Williams’ new commercial strategy is winning over sponsors

The recent Monaco Grand Prix provided some welcome good news for the Williams Formula One team, scoring their first points of a tricky 2024 season.

Entering the race as one of two teams yet to register a point, a ninth-place finish for Alexander Albon on the streets of Monte Carlo offered a reminder of the historic team’s current standing, despite some encouraging progress in recent years.

Curiously, despite the dominant cars that have been produced at the team’s Grove facility, Williams have only ever won three times in Monaco. But it is now 21 years since the British outfit’s previous triumph in the principality with Juan Pablo Montoya.

The team’s current situation sees it with two points after eight races of the 2024 season. It might not seem like much, but Williams conspired to score just eight points across 69 races between 2018 and 2021.

After the decline from their golden years to the back of the grid, Williams are now threatening to sneak into the points on a consistent basis. And the narrative of a historic outfit on the comeback trail is an intriguing proposition for the team’s commercial department to sell.

“Williams is one of the most popular teams in the sport as a function of having been in the sport for over 45 years,” James Bower, commercial director of Williams Racing, tells BlackBook Motorsport. “And also, Williams has a very distinct brand equity. When people think about Williams, they think about things that are slightly different to other teams.

“When we look at F1 Fan Voice [the series’ official online community], Williams is either number one or very highly ranked for things like trustworthiness, independence, honesty, bravery – these things are really valuable.

“So a lot of it is looking at brand fit and brands that would align with us. From that, we secured Duracell, the most trusted brand in its space. Kraken is one of the longest standing cryptocurrency exchanges and also the most trusted brand in its space.”

Williams might be seeing an uptick in their commercial fortunes, but it took time to get to this point. Until recently, they were not just behind their competitors on the track, but they were also underdeveloped commercially. The team’s last major partnership with Martini between 2014 and 2018 was easily recognisable and visibly striking, but far from financially lucrative.

The team’s commercial strategy had to be overhauled, which is now beginning to bear fruit.

“We have a larger commercial team across three locations: an office in central London, [an office in] our Grove headquarters, and an office in New York,” Bower says. “The scale of the team has grown and that’s helping us develop commercial partnership opportunities.

“People often think [you need to] get lots of salespeople to get lots of partners, but it’s actually more like a driver model. You need people around the drivers to make them successful. You only want a handful of salespeople, but you need really good people around them in terms of proposals, data and insights, and understanding the landscape and how you’re targeting brands.”

Big in America

That New York office has been crucial for expanding the team’s horizons. Formula One executives may long for a ‘proper’ American team, but Williams have quietly reaped the rewards of the series’ US expansion.

With American owners and an American driver, the Grove-based team has become an attractive option for US brands, with Gulf Oil, Stephens, Michelob Ultra, PureStream, and Keeper Security all coming on board since the start of the 2023 season.

The most recent of those US-based brands to sign a deal with Williams was Keeper Security, which Bower says the team is “very happy about”. More broadly, he says the influx of US brands partnering with Williams not only speaks to Formula One’s growth in the country, but also how the structure of the calendar is supporting commercial conversations for the series’ teams.

“Keeper is a global company, but it’s important that F1 has the traction that it now has in North America,” Bower outlines.

“The importance of the Miami Grand Prix being [early] in the season is helpful for us commercially and it helps us drive momentum. Having the two races in the US later in the year, but having Miami at the beginning of May [helps us].

“Bringing on new partners during the season is rarer than when you typically see them at the start, so it’s a positive for us.”

The breaks between US races also enable the team to plan a number of activations with their partners and engage their stakeholders, further boosting the momentum of their commercial programmes at specific points throughout the season.

Back stateside with @MichelobULTRA 🤩🇺🇸

The countdown to Lap of Legends is on! ⏳ pic.twitter.com/owUQQS1fav

— Williams Racing (@WilliamsRacing) May 8, 2024

‘It’s about selling scarcity’

Securing partners as a Formula One team has not been particularly difficult in recent years. Long gone are the days of barren liveries, even for those towards the back of the grid.

Conversely, in many ways, teams are now at risk of commercial saturation, with cluttered liveries providing little in the way of individual visibility for brands. By the time Bower came on board at Williams, this was already proving to be an issue.

“I joined the team in 2021, and when I joined there were actually quite a lot of partners,” he explains. “We’ve created a new partner community, but it’s about selling scarcity; it’s about saying that the number of partners we will have over a five-year plan will be between this number and this number.”

Managing inventory and avoiding clutter are the two key challenges not just for Williams, but teams across the grid. Some teams, like Bower’s ex-employers McLaren, opt for maximum commercial activity to fill as much inventory as possible, but Williams have a different approach.

“It’s important commercially to achieve the right investment levels in terms of how that impacts you over time as well,” Bower highlights. “There may have been opportunities to make the car appear more full as part of our strategy [that we haven’t taken], so it’s a long-term strategy.”

Finding “the right fit” in a title sponsor

This long-term strategy has now led Williams to exploratory conversations geared towards acquiring a title sponsor. Now that Ferrari have agreed their groundbreaking deal with HP, they sit alongside McLaren as one of only two teams without a title partner on the grid.

Williams have a principal partnership with Komatsu, announced in February of this year, but the team’s eyes are now fixed on the future as they look for their first headline deal since their ill-fated collaboration with Rokit.

It’s crucial for the team to articulate the journey they have been on in order to secure a partner that aligns with that story, especially if they want to avoid a similarly unsuccessful partnership in the future.

“It’s a multiple year journey, we have investment in terms of spending up to the cost cap, and we have a secure future,” Bower says. “But I also have the management of partnerships as well, so we’re not making commitments that we can’t fulfil.

“I work very closely with James Vowles, and we communicate consistently with both current partners and prospective partners on where we are and where we intend to be, but there’s realistic timelines.”

And, importantly, how does securing a title partner play into this timeline?

“We’re active in the market now, we’re having conversations,” Bower says. “When we have the right fit and things align, then we’ll bring it on.

“But we’re not going to do it in a way that compromises a multiple year commercial strategy for the team – by that I mean the type of brand or the level of investment.

“It has to be the right fit for both us and the organisation that we’re talking to.”

Go deeper

• Claire Williams exclusive interview: Why she misses F1, watching Williams from afar, and providing opportunities for women
• Inside the deal: Why Williams stepped back into the crypto world with Kraken