My first job was in the superyacht industry, working for a publishing house that catered to everyone from shipyards and crew to brokers and owners. Every year I'd go to the various shows, and every year, whether at Monaco, Fort Lauderdale, Palma or Miami, I'd see exactly the same thing. And I mean exactly the same thing. Evening drinks on the stand and sometimes, if there was a particularly generous owner, on a superyacht itself. Don't get me wrong - it certainly wasn't a bad way to spend a week. I wasn't complaining then and I'm not complaining now. But come show season, you knew exactly what to expect - and everyone I spoke to, marketers included, would agree. Maybe that was the point - a sense of consistency in an often volatile market.
It's been close to a decade since I left the superyacht industry, and I hadn't thought about it too much until I joined Blueprint Partners. One of the sectors we specialise in is automotive, specifically with luxury automotive brands. It's certainly not the same as the superyacht market, but it's not worlds way either.
Making a splash with target audiences
Weeks into starting at Blueprint, I was blown away by some of the work we'd done for our automotive clients who wanted to engage with external audiences. We launched a luxury car by sailing it under Tower Bridge and producing a live broadcast in BBC Studios. This got more than 1 million live viewers, saw an instant spike in press coverage, influencer content and earned media and ultimately saw deposits taken during and immediately after the broadcast.
We ran a three-week press drive across Europe for the same brand, resulting in coverage with an opportunity to see of 31.4 million, almost 50,000 impressions across just two social posts, leading to it winning PR Event of the Year in the Content & PR UK Awards earlier this week.
Then there was the car reveal for the BWT Alpine F1 Team, which contributed to the 90+ pieces of online coverage about the Team in the days following the event.
Enabling global sales networks
I've also been lucky enough to witness our internal enablement team deliver seriously impressive programmes to drive consistency and, subsequently, revenue across their sales and partner networks. Again, clearly different, but not overwhelmingly dissimilar to the brokerage networks I recognise from the superyacht world.
Things like when we delivered global training for JLR on modern luxury following their brand repositioning. Our training programme transformed the way more than 40,000 global JLR retail colleagues interacted with clients, putting luxury at the heart of the experience.
Or when we delivered a world-class dealer marketing operation for Aston Martin's franchised dealer network, supporting more than 200 dealers across four continents by creating more than 1,000 media assets.
And then there's the Knowledge app, our closed-AI solution that surfaces the information already within your business in seconds. Whether it's testing and training brokers on the experience a customer should get when engaging with your brand, or bringing a broker every single detail of a superyacht's specifications, and comparing those to the other yachts in your fleet (again, in seconds), we're already seeing these solutions transform the automotive world, increasing efficiency and revenue.
Being brave and bold gets results
I've been really impressed by our clients' desire to be brave and bold. They know that brave and bold get results. And the braver they are, the better the results. We see this every day, and I'm intrigued as to whether this bold and brave approach has reached the superyacht industry. I hope it has, because the vessels these brokerage houses and shipyards get the opportunity to market are jaw-dropping, and the marketing should be too. In fact, we've been discussing this in the office and have already come up with a whole host of ideas that, from a bit of research, it seems haven't been done in the superyacht industry - yet.
The more I think about it, the more similarities of opportunity I can see between the way the automotive and superyacht sectors engage with their audiences - both externally with their customers and internally with their sales networks. Without a doubt, the two industries are different - I wouldn't dare to suggest otherwise. But different doesn't mean unrelatable. If a business in the superyacht industry adopted some of the proven strategies seen by the very best automotive marketing agencies, it could be transformational.
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