Ready, go! McLaren Leverage Fan-Generated Content Across eCommerce Journey 🏁

When it comes to gaining an edge on the competition, McLaren Racing has a famous appetite for innovation. And as the only racing team competing in Formula 1, IndyCar, Extreme E and esports – McLaren live by a simple rule: “physical or digital, on track or off-road – if it’s got four wheels, we’ll race it.”

McLaren F1 boasts one of the largest social followings in the sport, with almost 10 million followers on Instagram alone. Their fan-driven social media strategy is something the team takes real pride in too: McLaren supporters are encouraged to tag their content with #FansLikeNoOther, with content collected and curated in the StoryStream platform then being displayed across their app, website, and displayed on screens in the pit garages to inspire the team.

The ever-deepening relationship between McLaren and StoryStream features many highlights – check out this throwback to McLaren F1 managing the launch of its new MCL34 racing car using StoryStream in 2019 – with the partnership now extending also to McLaren’s eCommerce property, the McLaren Store.

Connecting social content to commerce

Under the heading “Looking for Inspiration?” visitors to the McLaren Store will find a live social gallery showcasing available merchandise – as worn by drivers, team members, and fans too. It’s yet another fantastic use case for all that User-generated Content that McLaren is collecting: connecting that content to commerce through StoryStream’s “smart goals”.

Visitors to the store can use those smart goals to navigate from the social gallery directly to a product page, where they can add the merch item depicted to their basket. Like the look of the t-shirt that Daniel Riccardo was wearing as he signed fan programmes ahead of the Australian Grand Prix? Tap the smart goal, and add it to your basket. It’s that simple!

As well as a homepage inspiration gallery, McLaren has implemented StoryStream galleries on both Lando Norris’ and Daniel Ricciardo’s driver biography pages on McLaren.com.

Designed to further encourage the discoverability of official merchandise across McLaren’s digital properties, users can shop the look of their sporting heroes there and then.

Up Next

With the 2022 F1 Season heating up, we’re excited to see how McLaren’s latest innovation in User-generated Content works across the full racing calendar. Next on the agenda for StoryStream and McLaren will be bringing more fan-created content into the galleries across the Store and driver biography pages, and adding smart goal CTAs: connecting fan content to commerce like never before.