WYRF transcript final v2 - The Daily Sail

positive opportunity for our sport,
forcing us to change and become
more innovative. In the
presentation that follows I try to
summarise some of my company’s
and personal experience that
luckily brought me to have a
broad and privileged observatory
on our sport, from managing
sponsors to chairing Olympic and
international classes or to be
seated at the ISAF committees and
still to sail at a professional level.
Unfortunately many super good
sailors were born in my same
year, like Paul Cayard, for
example. And as to the time I
came on to this circuit, once God
decided that I should be born
Italian, I was obviously late! So
when I showed up, most of the
sailing talent available for that year
was already gone to these guys
and I had to deal with the rest!
But I know we are short on time
and I hope to bring a sort of
positive message.
I’ll start from a small theoretical
background just so we are all on
the same page, saying that in the
early 1980s companies were
focussed on ‘total quality
management’ where the key factor
was the product quality. Once the
quality has been achieved, in the
1990s the successful strategy was
the ‘business process reengineering’
and the key factor
was cost reduction. And the last
decade has been the decade of the
information society to prevail and
the key factor is the information
value to that is population and
customers, which are some of the
principle characteristics of the
information society. I think we
should move forward…
Principle characteristics of the
information society are the
increased competitiveness,
increasing performance
expectations, social fragmentation
and increasing variability of
customer preferences, spread
education, while for new products
make a quicker impression on the
market and faster technological
obsolescence. This new society
and markets really have
determined the present
extraordinary importance of the
customer satisfaction. A new kind
of consumer is born. He has
totally fulfilled his primary needs
and therefore he doesn’t attribute
to the consumption and
functioning link to his own
survival. The new customer gives
to the consumption an added
psychological value and the special
task to satisfy his social needs.
And this new customer is the new
‘pull’ logic to work better than the
old ‘push’ logic that you see in the
graphic [above]. In this
environment, the function of
marketing has changed from
operational to strategic. The goal
is to establish a dialogue with
consumers developing channels
to facilitate the communication
and creating a perceived high value
to stabilise the relationship in
between companies and
customers in a process called
‘customer relationship
management’. And here, in my
opinion, sports marketing is one
of the most usable tools to
achieve these results. And in fact
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