Case 01 Sports & Entertainment Ethnographic Research

The fans were loyal. Nobody knew what they were loyal to.

A major American motorsports organization wanted to understand what its sport actually means to fans. The answer changed not just a campaign, but how the organization saw the category it competes in.

Client
Major Motorsports Organization
Industry
Sports & Entertainment
Engagement
Brand & Campaign Strategy
Method
Ethnographic Research
The brief

The organization didn’t need another readout on fan satisfaction. It needed to know what the sport actually means to the people who love it — and how to hold that ground in an entertainment landscape fighting for every minute of attention.

Every sport competes for the same scarce thing: time. Streaming, gaming, every other league — all of it pulls at the hours a fan might otherwise spend with racing. To defend that ground, the organization needed more than a profile of who its fans were. It needed to understand the pull itself — what the sport gives people that keeps bringing them back.

There was a conventional way to answer that. Field a large tracking survey. Host a round of focus groups. Ask fans to rate what they enjoy, chart the responses, and hand over a tidy deck of preferences. It would have been defensible, on time, and almost useless — because it would have described the surface and missed the thing running underneath it.

The path most would have taken

Run the standard fan study — survey what people say they enjoy, rank the attributes, and deliver a chart of stated preferences.

The reframe

The question everyone was asking: what do fans enjoy about the sport?

So we changed the question

What does this motorsports experience give people that nothing else can?

The evidence

Three things you only see when you stop asking what fans like — and start watching what they feel.

Exhibit A Finding 01

Fans don’t have the words for it on a survey — so we stopped relying on the words.

Ask someone to rate “excitement” on a seven-point scale and you learn how they fill out a form, not what moves them. We ran ethnographic research with fans across the country — at tracks, in living rooms, in infield campgrounds — reading lived experience instead of collecting stated opinion.

What people did told a different story than what they said they wanted.

Not what they say — what they feel. Not surface attributes — emotional truth.The shift that reframed the study
Exhibit B Finding 02

The pull wasn’t the cars. It was the permission to feel something, unguarded.

The deeper we went, the clearer it got: the sport’s hold had little to do with horsepower and everything to do with a rare kind of release. In a culture that keeps most feeling at arm’s length, this is one of the few places people let themselves be all the way into something — loud, hopeful, unironic.

It’s one of the last places people experience something raw and real.The emotional truth beneath the sport
Exhibit C Finding 03

The organization isn’t competing with other motorsports. It’s competing for a feeling almost nothing else delivers.

That reframed the category entirely. The real competitive set wasn’t other racing — it was every experience that offers unfiltered, communal exhilaration. Seen that way, the organization’s advantage isn’t speed. It’s meaning — and meaning is defensible in a way a list of attributes never is.

The research didn’t validate assumptions. It redefined the value of the experience itself.The reframe, in one line
The outcome

That reframe became a national campaign built on the exhilaration and pride fans feel, not the attributes they’d have listed on a form. The research didn’t answer the question the organization came in with. It gave the team a better one to build on.

Your turn

Tell us the problem. We’ll tell you what we can do with it.

No lengthy brief required. If you know the decision you’re trying to make, that’s enough to start.

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