Fan Engagement in Motorsports: A Case of the FIA World Rally Championship

Abstract

Social media success is increasingly being linked to profitable relations between sporting teams and their communities of fans. Through a case study of RallytheWorld, Volkswagen’s social media campaign 2013-2016 for the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC), this paper provides sports marketers with relevant practices on how to develop social media strategies and building relationships with and between the fans. Drawing upon theories of community facilitation and ‘transmedia storytelling’, as well as the method of autoethnography, our finding is that RallytheWorld, through its audience engagement techniques provided WRC fans with a new experience while respecting the championship’s sporting traditions. This combination, we argue, made RallytheWorld a qualitatively better offer to rally fans than comparable social media campaigns in the WRC.