It’s not just about placing a logo on a race car as advertisements for Cognizant, the world-renowned IT consulting company and consultancy.
The New Jersey-based brand, which earned a reputation for modernizing other companies, took its own leap by doing just that last year. The company joined Aston Martin to serve as title sponsor when Lawrence Stroll brought the English back to Formula 1 for the first time in 61 years.
“The ultimate goal is to make this car faster,” said Gaurav Chand, Cognizant’s lead marketing director. “The main explanation for why we invest is that racing is traditionally a very tech-friendly game. We are now doing this with the Aston Martin F1 team’s offering in 12 other powerhouses.
“We wanted to make sure we were with a team that has a set of loyalists. Aston Martin is an incredible brand. We went beyond that this is not just a sponsorship. It’s safe and definitely a partnership. “
The signing of a multimillion-dollar Formula 1 contract is a genuine sign of the seriousness with which Cognizant plans to expand its overseas market. The multi-year deal gave Aston Martin a sense of convenience and allowed Cognizant to expand its go-to-market strategy around the team. .
When Chand joined Cognizant, it was clear that the company needed to gain global exposure to expand outside the United States. In addition, Cognizant was known as a foreign player, and Chand wanted to explain the intensity of the brand’s virtual transformation.
“It not only created awareness, but it also replaced perception,” Chand said. “We have looked for other tactics to do so. We looked at another 40 houses in the game itself. There were very few who touched either cube. Formula 1 struck either cube naturally because it is an incredibly popular game with 22-24 games worldwide in our preceding countries.
“I had the ability to create global awareness with the logo on the car. But it also had the ability to replace belief due to hospitality in racing, where we can invite consumers and communicate to them how we are at the intersection of generation. and careers
With Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll at the wheel of the team’s two race cars, the team looks to the future. Vettel retires at the end of the season and veteran Fernando Alonso will take over in 2023.
Chand gave an example of participation in a Formula 1 event in Amsterdam. Dutch customers, he said, revealed they didn’t know Cognizant before the logo entered Formula 1. Now they know what Cognizant is doing.
In 2019, 30% of Cognizant’s portfolio is virtual. Now, Cognizant is 50% closer to virtual and Formula 1 is tasked with turning the company’s belief in.
“After a year and a half of this partnership, I noticed a lot of construction on the outreach front, as well as the resumption of virtual engagement charts with our customers,” Chande said.
A key component of the component partnership is helping Aston Martin with its knowledge analysis, which Cognizant expects to continue for years to come.
“We work with them on knowledge science, and a big component of that game is understanding aerodynamics,” Chande said. knowledge. We are a team that takes a lot of this knowledge and collects it to do a review for engineers and drivers.