Sports marketing in India : A study on cricket

Abstract

As sport as a business has developed in recent years we have seen a plethora of non-sport related companiesusing sport as a medium to reach out to sport enthusiasts with their products and services. This has given riseto the importance of sport marketing. Sport marketing has many aspects to it. It could involve the promotionof a sporting event, a sport or it could use sport related activities or players to promote marketing of goods1.We are interested in the last aspect of sport marketing, where a particular sport is used to market a wide arrayof goods. Sport marketing as a channel is an interesting field of study as it has very high positive networkeffects – popularity of the sport is directly proportional to the sponsors it attracts. However, what makes itreally interesting is the boot-strap effect – more money pouring in for a sport means better infrastructure andattracting more talent, thereby increasing the popularity of the game.Of particular interest is the use of cricket as a means of marketing means in the Indian sub-continent. Whileorganized marketing is not new in India, but the rapid growth of cricket marketing and the huge audience inthe country for this sport makes it an interesting study. We propose that the rapid growth of cricket andcricket infrastructure can be credited to the financial powers which marketing brings to the game.This study looks into sport marketing and the well-defined frameworks it has for being successful2. Theseframeworks are then analysed for cricket and then we try to find out how suitable these frameworks are forcricket in the Indian subcontinent. We also try to map the phenomenal growth of cricket marketing in India inthe last 3 decades with some form of implementation of such frameworks.The chosen time-span for this study is 1983-2011, the interval between India’s two World-Cup wins. Whilethere are interesting ideas on the growth of India as a cricketing power, this study restricts its scope only inthe financial power of India – the cricket controlling board and the market that it caters to. The study takes adeep look into Indian Premier League (IPL) which has been recognized as the zenith of cricket marketing inIndia. The study is more of an analysis – in which we want to track the success factors for cricket marketing tobe so successful and try to determine if such factors are specific to cricket or could be generic to any sport inIndia.This study relies heavily on published work, both in terms of frameworks and previous studies on cricketmarketing. The research is mostly based on secondary data from authentic sources, owing to the paucity offreely available data from the sport bodies. At the end of the study we aim to pinpoint the reasons for cricketbeing such a successful channel of marketing in India and conclude whether any other form of Sportmarketing could be successful in India.