Why would someone buy a T-shirt with your logo on it?

The time is here! Racer on Demand is starting with the first wave of onboarding racers to sell on our merch marketplace. As a reminder, this marketplace will be launching in May 2024 and will be the one-stop-shop for fans to find all their favorite racer merchandise in one place. Racers joining this revolution will no longer face the burdens of high inventory costs, packing and shipping orders, or struggling to get their merch in front of customers. Instead, leave that work to us: our drop-shipping partner will produce and ship every order that’s placed on our high-visibility marketplace.

All you’ve got to do is answer the question: Why would someone buy a T-shirt with your logo on it?

One of my favorite T-shirts is from Exedy Racing Clutch and has an exploded view of a clutch setup on it. Sure, the design looks pretty cool, but more than that, I like the way I feel when I wear it. In my mind, Exedy stands for sporty, high-quality, technical components, and when I’m wearing it, I’m basically wearing a sign that says “I know my stuff about motorsports.” Without knowing me, it’s immediately clear to others that I’m a gearhead and someone walking up to me is more likely to ask me about racing than to ask me about the football game. So sure, it’s a shirt with a clutch on it, but it’s also a way for me to tell everyone around me that I’m into motorsports and high-quality, technical race stuff.

Why do you buy T-shirts with logos on them? Take a peek into your closet (or laundry heap, no judgement here,) and think about why you bought each of your branded shirts. Which ones do you wear the most? Why? How do you feel when you’re wearing them and how do other people think of you because of them? What do you want people to feel or think about your logo on a T-shirt?

It’s all about building your brand.

I feel great in my Exedy shirt because I relate to their brand and what I feel like their brand means. But what is a brand and what makes it different from a logo? A brand is much more than a logo. It's the overall impression that people have of you as a racer. It's how they feel about you, what they think of you, and what they expect from you. And here’s a tough pill to swallow – it’s not enough to be really good at racing. That’s not a brand.

Your brand is a culmination of how everything you do, say, and post is perceived by your audience. Your audience is going to feel, think, and expect different things about your brand based on every interaction they have with you, either directly or indirectly. A post on Facebook, a podium speech, and a one-on-one chat at the track are all opportunities to show your fans and partners what you want them to think, feel, and expect from you. What you say, how you act, and how that made them feel in these moments is what your fans will think about when they see your logo on a shirt in their laundry pile. Are they going to pick it up and put it on?

What doesn’t create a strong brand is a lack of consistency. What does a fan think when they meet you at the track and you’re optimistic, excited, and full of hope for the race? They’re probably feeling amped up and ready to root you on. What happens to that feeling when they log onto social media and see you bashing a competitor, complaining that payouts aren’t high enough, or outwardly wondering why you even race? There’s no brand consistency there. Your logo just lost all meaning and they’re going to toss that T-shirt back in the laundry pile.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to be really nice all the time, never get mad, and always say exactly the right thing. That’s not even remotely true. There are fans of the nice guys, and there are also fans of the hard-as-nails, tough around the edges racers who don’t owe anything to anybody. But how many fans do you know root for a driver that is wishy-washy, nice one day and temperamental or mean the next? They wouldn’t know what to feel, they wouldn’t know what to think, and they certainly wouldn’t know what to expect. It’s all about consistency.

Let’s get intentional about branding.

Your brand exists whether you’re working on it intentionally or not. Your audience is observing, forming judgements, and predicting your next action based entirely off of their perceptions of you, this far. Have you been intentional about your brand? If not, this should help.  

You’re going to hear me tout this book over and over again because I think it’s chocked full of brilliant takeaways – in Seth Godin’s book, This is Marketing, he introduces the concept of creating a matrix to help define your brand and find your target audience. The concept is pretty simple, you think about your audience and pick out two things that could be important to them. Oftentimes this also translates to two things that are really important to YOU.

For this example, let’s say you care about having a cool-looking racecar and about having fun. You’d draw a quadrant with two axes – one vertical and one horizontal – labeled with those two values. Picture something like this:

Now, put yourself in the top right corner. That’s going to be YOUR brand. You’re making a promise to your audience to consistently show up with a cool-looking racecar while visibly having lots of fun. Some fans will like it, others won’t, but the ones who do are going to lean in and make REAL connections with you. There are going to be other racers who have cool-looking racecars, and there will be other racers who have lots of fun, but how many of them will intentionally connect with fans that care about BOTH of those things? That’s where you come in.

So think about it – what are the labels on your axes? What are the values that you and your audience both find important? What are two things that you can commit to consistently delivering over and over again, as long as your brand lives? Pick those out and frame every fan and sponsor interaction with those in mind. If you can’t deliver it every time, don’t base your brand on it. If you put “winning races” on one of your axes, you better deliver on that promise consistently, or your brand won’t mean anything. Frame every post, every podium speech, every one-on-one chat, and every moment in the public eye with these values and you’ll be delivering on the promise you’ve made to the fans and partners who are leaning in to meet you there.

And guess what – those fans will buy a T-shirt with your logo on it.