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The IPL has merchandising gurus working overtime
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Photo: S. Subramanium
Everything is branded Watch out for merchandise in the IPL
Sold out! All natural elements like air, water, sky, fire and earth. It doesn’t belong to who you thought owned it, anymore. If you still want your share of it, please contact the Indian Premier League.
Sony has exclusive telecast rights, an MNC beverage company is the official (and the only) supplier of beverages inside the stadia. The ‘lease’ that corporate houses had on boxes next to the players dressing rooms is null and void during the IPL League matches. They will all be up for sale again as the entire stadium has been rented to IPL by the respective cricket associations during the period of IPL League tournament.
Bids have already been invited for food, snacks, ice-cream stalls inside the stadium. Who knows what’s next? Beer supply contracts (the lite variety probably), premium parking space inside the stadia, wonder balloons floating in the air space vertically up above, laser shows during dinner breaks….all may get sold for neat packets, feels U.V. Narayana Murthy of YJK Group. Even the players, one can venture to assume, will not be ‘spared’. “Advertisers may step forward to sponsor the IPL franchisee teams. The franchisees may themselves have their players cut inaugural ribbons of shopping complexes, have them pose with the store’s first 50 customers. For a fee of course,” Muthy adds. Make every inch of space on the body and soil count; to win over maximum share of mind. And then you still have the World Wide Web. “We would sell ad space on our official website,” says Vijay Mohan Raj, Manager of the IPL Hyderabad franchise team, Deccan Chargers. All the above is just about sponsorship and in-stadia rights. Just one stream of the revenue, that is. The other one being — merchandising. A small flashback, if one may.
Turgid summer evenings and monsoon afternoons three decades ago — neighbourhood East Bengal and Mohun Bagan ‘heroes’ in familiar red-yellow and maroon-green jerseys would fill out lanes, streets, parks and maidans of Kolkata. And innumerable footpath stalls at Gariahat junction and sports goods at the corner of Deshapriya Park would make a flourishing livelihood of selling these football jerseys with household names of Calcutta Soccer League star players monogrammed on the backs of the jerseys.
This was nothing but merchandising in its most basic form. “Today it’s clearly a revenue model as well as a long strategy in brand building at an international level,” claims Vijay Mohan Raj.
Watch out for merchandise like branded clothing, head and wrist bands, bugles, sashes etc being sold inside the stadium as well anywhere outside including the net.
BCCI has not really had a history of dabbling in merchandising save for the world cup jersey tie-up with a clothing retail chain . So what? There has always got to be a first time.
BALAJI VITTAL
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