Racing: BHB enters the market for winning ideas: The Turf's rulers set out their stall for growth, as the last Derby hopefuls line up on trial. Greg Wood reports

SAME faces, different name was the gut reaction when the British Horseracing Board was created to replace the Jockey Club as racing's ultimate administrative body. It is an accusation which grows ever harder to sustain.

Take, for example, the publication yesterday of the BHB's marketing strategy for the next two and a half years. In the bad old days the average racing administrator's idea of an inter-active plan for profit maximisation was to evict one of his tenant farmers as a warning to the others. For years, the Jockey Club was rightly criticised for lacking a clear, sensible vision of the future. Now, the BHB is offering an intelligent analysis of racing's problems which identifies basic strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Numerous separate actions are planned, to bring about essential objectives.

'This plan has attempted to follow the generally accepted marketing planning process prevalent in commercial organisations,' Lee Richardson, the BHB's recently- appointed marketing director, says in his introduction to the 60-page document setting out his aims. Some will sneer that he wants to sell racing like soap powder, but the response must surely be: if it works, who cares?

The most important difference, perhaps, is that the BHB does not have at its disposal the sort of budget which can hire celebrities to protest that only their powder washes whiter. No one, least of all Richardson, imagines that a marketing plan can address the chronic, long-term problem of under-funding which afflicts British racing.

'Whenever we spend a pound on marketing investment, we need to be tracking the return we get from it and making sure that what we're doing is as cost-effective as possible,' he said.

'Also, every pound we attract in sponsorship investment is an incremental pound above the Levy income, so you're allowing those funds to be used for other purposes.'

Despite talk of SWOT analysis and ROMI ratios, the BHB's plan cannot be dismissed as a pointless exercise in marketing froth. Numbers of owners and spectators are in decline. Off-course betting turnover has been falling, in real terms, for 30 years and the nascent National Lottery can only make things worse. The future holds many difficult problems, but at least - and at last - racing administrators are planning ahead.

While Richardson and his colleagues were attempting to improve racing's public image in one part of Portman Square yesterday, the Jockey Club's disciplinary committee was doing its bit in another. Ray Cochrane, summoned to answer his third charge of whip mis-use this season, admitted using the stick with unreasonable force and frequency on Spot Prize, runner-up in last Tuesday's Musidora Stakes.

The Committee banned him from riding for six days from Thursday, though given the dreadful start which Cochrane has made to the Flat season, he might welcome the chance to lock himself away and pull the curtains.

The Irishman rode almost 90 winners last term, but has managed just five on turf this year. Victory for Cochrane on King Of Naples, Roger Charlton's Derby candidate, in the Predominate Stakes at Goodwood this afternoon would be an overdue change of fortune.

(Photograph omitted)