We are, in a way, selling both our team and the FIRST philosophy. When our team goes to competition, we want people to see us and know quickly who we are, distinct from other teams. We want to stand out and be easy to recognize and remember. Being easy to recognize is part of team branding which helps us with the judges, other teams and the audience. Branding can include t-shirt designs, logos, buttons, banners, flags, pit decorations, costume parts and more that all match our team’s theme.

We also work to promote our team and FIRST within our school, our sponsors and the public. This takes advertising. Advertising helps us to recruit new members and mentors. It helps us to get sponsors and donations to help with funding. It helps tell our school and the community about FIRST so more people are interested in robotics. Advertising can include making videos, writing news articles, making presentations with displays and posters, making speeches or showing the robot to people and more.

One thing you always need to keep in mind when doing marketing is copyright rules. Images and writing belong to the person or organization that made them. When you use someone else’s work you must either pay for it or have permission and always give credit where it belongs. Especially with the internet making it easy to ‘borrow’, it is important to be very careful. If you aren’t, that’s called plagiarism, and it is stealing.