MotoGP, the leading motorcycle racing tournament, has never lacked jeopardy. What it has lacked is a unified articulation of what that jeopardy means and a clear brand.

As the championship gets ready to launch its new season, the ambition is more than cosmetic, it is cultural. More than just raising awareness of what is – in most markets – a more niche motorsport, the brand wants to build a larger marketing infrastructure around its grand prix and riders.

This involves everything from investing in digital and OOH activations, building on race day events, to investing in merchandising, so the brand is more visible in an increasingly competitive motorsports space.

Managing director of global marketing at MotoGP, Kelly Brittain, who joined the organisation before last season, is candid about the reset that has taken place behind the scenes.

“If I could distil everything we want to do, it’s around cultural relevance,” she tells Marketing Week. “We’re really rock and roll. It’s just we don’t tell that story well enough. We don’t behave like we’re rock and roll, but we genuinely are.”

She uses the example of casual and performative fandom to explain further: “I would like my kids to own MotoGP clothing because it’s seen as cool, not because it’s MotoGP.”

“They might say something like ‘I went to a race day and Kendrick Lamar was playing there’ and that is the kind of cultural relevance that we need to drive through the sport.”

Our job is to build an ecosystem around the sport so that it has easier on-ramps.

Kelly Brittain, MotoGP

A brand refresh consisting of updates to typography, colours, and imagery, was already completed before Brittain’s arrival, but more needed to be done in a broader scope.

When Brittain joined, she found a business that looked sharper but lacked a shared narrative. “You asked 10 different people what MotoGP stood for and you’d get about 10 different answers,” she says.

“What we hadn’t done was really understand from our fans – current and prospective – what role this sport plays in their lives, what they value in it, and what they feel is missing elsewhere.”

Building a brand ecosystem

The past year has been spent correcting that. The research, conducted across multiple territories, surfaced several recurring themes.

First, fans live “distracted” lives, endlessly scrolling and skimming. Very little commands full attention. Second, modern sport increasingly feels over-managed. “It’s safe, it’s polished, it feels like outcomes are inevitable,” Brittain says. Rivalries are manufactured and athletes can feel too media trained.

Third, beyond sport, “life itself” can feel scripted, so fans crave a sense of risk. Against that backdrop, MotoGP’s rawness is an asset.

“I think what fans are looking for is something that is just going to feel real and raw and risky,” she says . “And we don’t have to make the sport dramatic. It just is. We don’t have to amp it up in an inauthentic way. It’s there.”

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The campaign it is launching today (18 February) to mark the new season leans into that truth. Rather than smoothing edges, it aims to sharpens them. The messaging positions MotoGP as a place where chaos is not choreographed and where skill and courage still determine outcomes.

But Brittain is clear that creative alone will not deliver the growth the championship wants. The strategy is as much about infrastructure as inspiration.

“Our job is to build an ecosystem around the sport so that it has easier on ramps,” she says.

Historically, many of MotoGP’s commercial relationships have been endemic to motorsport – fuels, lubricants, engineering brands.

“We don’t have much in the way of merchandising brand partnerships, and a lot of our partnerships have been endemic rather than consumer-facing lifestyle brands,” she explains.

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The shift now is towards brands with personality and accessibility. Brittain talks about the kind of partnership that might not deliver the largest immediate cheque, but opens cultural doors.

“They want to work with us because we bring them a super-engaged audience, and we want to work with them because they take us to new audiences,” she says.

That is where the idea of a cultural cachet emerges.

This, however, is not about copying the playbook of other series. Brittain previously worked in Formula 1 and is wary of lazy comparisons. “It’s a very different sport,” she says.

In MotoGP, since many riders come from working-class backgrounds, accessibility is part of its DNA. “There’s kind of a lack of ego and accessibility around us that you don’t get in F1,” she argues.

The opportunity lies not in mimicry but in learning how other leagues have expanded their entertainment wrapper. “It’s not about copying one as such. It’s about learning from the Super Bowl, from the NFL, from the NBA,” she says . “How can you grow the ecosystem? How can you increase dwell time at your races so people are more likely to invest in tickets, merchandise, the IP?”

That thinking is reshaping the race weekend itself. Historically, Brittain admits, MotoGP would “turn up, do a little bit at the race, capture some content, and then off we go and see you in 12 months”. The new approach treats races as entertainment destinations.

City-centre activations, watch parties and experiential partnerships are designed to meet fans where they are, particularly in markets where circuits sit far from urban footfall.

Critically, the strategy recognises there is no single MotoGP fan. According to Brittain, in Malaysia, fandom penetration reaches 55%. In the US, it sits at 5% – albeit a deeply committed 5%.

YouGov’s 2026 Sport Global Buzz Rankings for MotoGP reflect this split by country. The only two countries where the brand ranks in the top 10 are Italy (where it ranks six) and Spain (four). By contrast, in the UK, the sport ranks 43.

It’s not about copying one as such. It’s about learning from the Super Bowl, from the NFL, from the NBA.

Kelly Brittain, MotoGP

Rather than define a narrow demographic, the business now segments markets into core, developing and frontier.

Core markets such as Spain, Italy and France require cultural renewal; getting new fans into the sport.

Developing markets need always-on engagement beyond race spikes. Frontier markets, including the UK and US, demand awareness-building on their own terms.

Future facing

Underpinning all of this is a recognition that the commercial upside of the top tier sustains the entire pyramid. “It’s a big halo effect,” Brittain says . “The more that we can drive the awareness and consideration of MotoGP, which ultimately brings more money in, that money does trickle down.”

Brittain is pragmatic about timelines. The marketing team itself is only 18 months old, and core functions are still being built. This is not a one-season fix but a five-year ambition.

“In five years’ time, I’d love to ask a group of 16- to 28-year-olds what they think of MotoGP and hear them say, ‘Yeah, it’s cool,’” she says. Not because they have memorised championship standings, but because the brand shows up in culture, in music, in fashion, in the spaces they already inhabit.

The racing, she insists, does the heavy lifting. “This sport is insane,” she says. The challenge now is to make sure the world sees it that way too.