Around 0.5% of UK SMEs switched their business bank last year through the industry scheme. Revolut is title partner of the Audi Revolut F1 Team, and it is selling into a market where almost the entire customer base is sitting still.

That single fact decides what the sponsorship is for, and it decides how you put a number on it.

Gareth Abel is an international CMO with a tech and services background, and he specialises in delivering sustainable profit growth leveraging proven effectiveness principles including mental availability, the 95-5 rule, the custom funnel, brand attribute tracking and more.

He uses this proven approach inside large businesses, and he has watched motorsport grow into a communications channel that major brands now take seriously.

When we spoke in June, he described a gap that F1's own success has opened up.

As the sport's popularity rapidly increased – new partners were added at pace as the teams (& F1 itself) took advantage of the rising tide. However, the marketing effectiveness rigour around the sale has room to catch up, which presents a significant opportunity.

You can see the gap in what gets reported at the end of a season. Reach delivered, VIPs entertained, media value calculated, a few hundred people touched at an activation.

Each of those is a count of activity. However, the person holding the investment budget is asking a different question: what's the outcome that changed in the business?

The best marketing leaders and brands are now using marketing science to deliver business outcomes and this touches every aspect of their diagnosis, strategy, tactics and tracking. Investments in F1 will increasingly be assessed in this way.

A very small number of people, on a very long clock.

A large company choosing a banking partner is making a decision it expects to live with for a long time. Ask around your own finance team and you will find people who have been with the same bank for 20 or 30 years.

Gareth's read, from years on the brand side of these decisions, is that the maths shifts accordingly. The 95-5 rule puts only 5% of buyers in market at any moment.

He estimates business banking runs closer to 99-1, given how long those relationships hold, and he was clear on the call that this is his inference from experience and not a published figure.

John Dawes, who originated the 95-5 rule, calls it a heuristic that moves with the purchase cycle, so Gareth is extending the thinking in the direction it was built to go.

The two hard numbers I can stand up are the 0.5% SME switching rate and a median US business banking relationship of around seven years.

The conclusion holds either way. Almost nobody is buying this quarter, so the whole job is being the credible option on the day the 1% moves. This is called building mental availability - and it's the main job for marketers.

You measure how your brand's intentional positioning lands in the segment you care about, against the people you are trying to take business from.

This is what brand attribute tracking does. A brand names the things it wants to be known for (its positioning) - credible, international, technical heritage and performance - and it measures where it sits on each one. It measures against itself over time to see progress, against its competitors to see position, and against anything negative it is carrying and wants to shed.

Third-party analytics tools like Kantar and Qualtrics run this work for many large brands on a regular cycle. Synthetic market research businesses using AI are now making this faster and cheaper, offering brands an effective new tool to measure their brand management efforts.

Take a generic example. A brand sits at 3.5 out of 5 on being perceived as credible in its chosen segment. It sets an objective of 4.0 by a stated date.

Every activity from that point is judged on whether the score moved. Nobody outside a brand's own building sees these numbers, including me, so treat the figures as illustration and the method as the takeaway.

Teams talk about "some kind of brand plan" that gets agreed between partner and team, and it links to the activity delivered.

The brand tracker sits somewhere else entirely, in the brand's own building. The two documents live next to each other and never speak.

This presents a major risk: the team's activity with the partner doesn't drive their objective.

Because the attributes are already in the asset.

A manufacturer with international reach, technical heritage, and a reputation for performance holds precisely what a challenger bank is trying to associate itself with to ensure its target segments consider Revolut a credible banking provider.

Audi F1's positioning lands those attributes accurately, and it does that work at the top of the funnel, on awareness and consideration, which is where mental availability gets built for everyone who is out of market today.

Revolut's own framing runs along the same line. Audi taking on the established teams reads as the counterpart of Revolut taking on the established banks.

Gareth's caution is that an F1 partnership is one lever among several.

Kantar's Art of Integration work found that integrated and customised campaigns run 57% more effectively than non-integrated ones, and that adding channels only helps where the channels work synergistically.

Sponsorship earns its keep alongside retail, owned channels, and advertising, all pointed at the same objective.

This means an F1 partnership on its own is a less effective way for brands to achieve their objectives and business outcomes than a multi-comms channel approach.

In addition, given the very limited human attention span, marketing campaigns designed to deliver mental availability need to run consistently for a long time (measured in years) to optimise their effectiveness.

Attributes compound, and a challenger has no decades of equity to draw on.

It gives you a diagnosis, and a diagnosis gives you a forecast.

Map it honestly:

Measure the conversion rate at each step, and you have a picture of what is delivering your business today. It arrives already calibrated in money, because the bottom of it is revenue.

Now benchmark each rate against the incumbents. One or two steps will look weak, and that is your signal.

For a challenger bank, the likely weak point is awareness to consideration, for a specific reason: people have heard of Revolut and have not yet decided to trust it with the treasury.

I am reasoning from the category there, since no one has shown me a funnel, and the diagnosis is the part any brand-side reader can run properly on their own numbers.

Then the forecast. Hold everything else constant, model what happens if that one conversion rate moves from where it is to where it should be, and you have the whole argument in one line. This lever, this movement, this commercial outcome.

The CFO then gets a single slide showing market size, where you convert, where you don't, the step you are targeting and what moving it is worth.

CFOs value this simple transparency and become marketing advocates quickly when they collaborate in this way.

Because the fan side of the team is a free laboratory for the capability the brand side has to sell.

Every team runs two marketing operations. One is aimed at fans. The other is aimed at partners, through acquisition, servicing and renewal.

The second one is where the money is, and the first one is where you can practise without a client watching.

What that looks like for Audi:

To be clear about what this is: Audi has said nothing publicly about running attribute tracking on its own fan base, and I am arguing for what the team could do rather than reporting what it does.

The Revolut deal does carry a version of the instinct. Revolut Business is being integrated into the team's own financial operations, so the team runs its money on the partner's product and finds out what it is like to be the customer. The same logic extends straight into how the team markets itself.

A team that operates its own business using this method enters into a conversation with a global CMO at a prospective partner with capabilities no deck can fake and no articulate salesperson can talk around.

For existing partners, it can also stay transparent about what is moving and what is stuck, and the link between activity and outcomes is what makes a partner reinvest year after year and let the effect compound.

UBS and Mercedes is what that looks like with time on it. Fourteen years in, renewed again in 2024, with a global brand platform built on craft that puts the team's own technical director and drivers on screen as the proof.

The timing is the opportunity. The principles of marketing science and effectiveness are now well proven. The sport's commercial growth has been quick enough that the rigour around it has room to catch up, and the first team to close that distance holds a differentiator the grid cannot copy at speed.

Brand-side: turn your positioning into attributes you want to be known for, then ask your research partner where you sit today. If nobody can tell you, that is the first job.

Team-side: run the positioning to attribute exercise on your own brand before you take it to anyone else's.