SUPERCARS FORMS FAN COUNCIL

Supercars forms fan council – Photo: InSyde Media

ARE you a passionate Supercars fan? Then standby you might be hearing from the category soon.

By BRUCE NEWTON

Supercars intends to form a fan council in 2020 to provide input from the grandstands on the future direction of the category.

The development and finalisation of Gen3 technical rules due for introduction in 2022 provided impetus for the council, but its brief will be wider than that.

“It’s around a discussion (of where) the entire sport is going,” explained Supercars CEO Sean Seamer. “Part of that will be Gen3.

“The strategic plan is to have a better qualitative dialogue with our fans. We obviously understand what they do and don’t like based on when they do tune in and when they don’t tune in and which events they come to.

“That’s quantitative data, what we want is a qualitative conversation with important fans, both the die-hard fans but also the light users.”

NASCAR also has a fan council, but it has 25,000 members and engages them at least twice monthly by email. Anyone can join and as long as you keep participating you stay a member.

But the Supercars selection and engagement process will be entirely different.

The Supercars fan council will comprise 10-12 members and will meet quarterly in 2020. At the end of the year a call will be made on its value and whether it will be continued.

“We’ll identify key influencers of ours through social media, we’ll look at the most frequent attendees and put a bit of a shortlist together and see who we can approach to pull them together,” said Seamer.

“But we’ll obviously want a broad demographic to contribute to that.”

Getting fans in who attend events live is seen as critical to the fan council’s structure.

“From our research this is category or a sport you have to see and smell,” said Seamer. “It’s a visceral experience. We know the people that come to our events have the best understanding of the product, so that would be a primary focus for us.”

The establishment of the fan council follows on from the formation of the Supercars manufacturer council in 2019.

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