Champions on the field!

Intrigued by the headline? The different faces of India are fodder for our columnist this week.

If the sponsors and organisers of the Cricket World Cup 2011 had drawn up a wish list before the impressive opening ceremony at Dhaka, the list might well have included:

Teams from the subcontinent in the last four (well, three of the last four were from the subcontinent)

India beating Australia in the knock-out (ideally it could have been the semi-final but I am not complaining).

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Beware the aura of IPL

Some of the glitz and glamour is bound to pall, given that there's much cricket from around the world being beamed into living rooms in India..

Stars all:The owners of the teams, Ness Wadia and Preity Zinta (Kings XI Punjab - left, extreme right), Shilpa Shetty (Rajasthan Royals – second from left) and IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi (second from right).

Australian cricket dominated pretty much all opposition it came up against from the mid-'90s till the end of 2006 at least, thanks to two outstanding champions, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne. It would be difficult to find two more dissimilar individuals in one team, but they had one thing in common — both were champions. Batsmen came to grief against these two, who often bowled their team to victory in tandem, more often than not because opposing teams ended up playing more than mere bowlers but battled the strength of their collective auras which combined to make the Australian team almost impossible to beat. Batsmen, thanks to the benefit of TV technology, had nightmares of the Gatting ball (or the ball of the century as it was branded) whenever the blond leg spinner came to bowl. They unearthed demons that were non-existent and played for drift that seemed larger than life and lost their wickets with surprising ease. As for McGrath, his annoying ability to deliver ball after ball on the same spot added as much to the pressure as his in-your-face displeasure if the batsman had the temerity to hit him for four.

Whilst there is no denying the phenomenal ability of these two bowlers, their success, in no small measure, was due to people sitting in the commentator's box and the media enclosures who aided and abetted the batsman's downfall with their analysis till paralysis of the bowlers' collective and individual abilities. Batsmen predictably ended up making horrendous errors of judgment and finished up looking silly, like Atherton often did, to the obvious delight of Aussie fans. When I looked at the recent IPL auction, with Kieron Pollard being bought for a staggering $750,000, I just wondered if there was a similarity between what happened on the cricket field earlier and what is happening now under the hammer and also analyse what has generally been happening with IPL since its inception.

Giving IPL its due

Make no mistake about it, India runs the cricketing world, much to the chagrin of some of our less fortunate cricket boards. India has the eyeballs, the sponsors, the money, the ability to brand and sell anything, including the weather forecast that precedes cricket matches, and just about everything that makes the world go around and everything that can make its detractors go around the bend. Often enough, India has made no bones about its clout and has blatantly flaunted it. But even diehard critics and the prophets of doom have had to concede that the IPL has been a marketing coup that showed the entire world a thing or two about sports marketing. It is a real concern though that IPL may hasten the demise of test cricket, but let us resist the temptation to set the cat amongst the pigeons just yet and stay with the marketing of IPL. IPL demonstrated the ability of its creators to build a brand in a very short period of time, create and deliver value even as it commanded a phenomenal premium for its offerings — whether it was television rights, franchisee bids for the teams or its ability to make players from all over the world drop everything and come running to India. Interestingly, some of them, such as Collingwood and Owais Shah who were constantly complaining about player workload, did not even get a game despite travelling halfway across the world!

It's a brand new world

Kieron Pollard, who was sold for $750,000, to Mumbai Indians
IPL has been all about brands, sponsorships and celebrities of varied hues. It has seen the emergence of unlikely businesspersons in people such as Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty from the world of entertainment, a charismatic business leader in Vijay Mallya entering cricket, Nita Ambani and a range of companies from media, infrastructure and cement, all of whom have forked out enormous amounts of money. It has also seen some of the office-bearers of the BCCI as owners of teams which might upset the purists but in Indian cricket, as we all know, anything goes, including the obnoxious behaviour of people such as Sreesanth and Ajit Agarkar. The bidding for the players has been a high-profile event where ordinary mortals such as you and I can witness how the rich and famous bid huge sums of money for the superstars of the T20 stage just the way they might bid for thoroughbreds! The IPL, quite simply put, is a heady mix of entertainment, glitz and glamour, with some cricket thrown in somewhere in the middle! But it is working or has been working for the people involved, including teams from Australia and the West Indies who have come to India, won and made an enormous amount of money in the bargain? Of course, if media reports are to be believed, the winning team from New South Wales has not been paid, but should we waste our time with needless details such as these?

Get ready for the next edition of IPL

The next edition of IPL will hit not only Indian grounds, Indian crowds, and global television audiences but also an online audience through YouTube. One of the characteristics of the IPL brand has been innovation even if one were to ignore the strategy break which was a poorly disguised attempt to sell more commercial time! Who knows, there may soon be pink balls! But in all fairness the brand has tried to innovate constantly and really showcased the enormous marketing acumen of the people who have been the brains behind this amazingly successful venture. They have been able to smell money anywhere!

A word of caution

Having spoken of IPL's tremendous strengths and offerings it is perhaps worthwhile to sound a word of caution to people who are placing enormous bets on the event and continue to do so. Clearly they are being carried away by the moment as they seem to be awestruck by the aura of IPL and are not placing as much emphasis on the possible return on investment that they seem to be making without so much as batting an eyelid! Starting from the franchisee bids for the teams, IPL has been all about premium pricing. Franchisees too ended up paying phenomenal sums of money, not only for the players, but for Indian stars with iconic status, many of whom will certainly not play for their country in the T20 format of the game.

The pricing for the television spots has been extremely high and some of the initial sheen, in my view, at least, is bound to wear off thanks to the phenomenal amount of cricket that is being played across the world, all of which is being shown in India, including the KFC big bash. But my biggest bone of contention has been the often reckless manner in which team owners have been buying cricketers. Many of the big-ticket items have been poor buys. Names such as Andrew Symonds, Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Flintoff, Kieron Pollard and even Shane Bond come to mind. Shane Bond is an amazing cricketer, with an astoundingly straight action amidst a generation of varying degrees of crookedness, but to pay what he is being paid for delivering four overs defies logic. Whilst I am happy for the benign policeman whose pension must be adequately provided for, I have nothing but scepticism about the outcome which might turn out to be a worse buy than the highly priced Ishant Sharma. I wonder if teams and their owners are succumbing to the aura and the excitement of the moment, the glare, the media attention, all of which does not make for sensible decision-making.

A prediction about the IPL ahead

Soon it will be IPL time and old foes will lock horns again, some of them with reconstituted teams. Younger legs will replace more tired ones and a new lot of retired and ICL players will make their debut, such as Damien Martyn and Shane Bond. The Pakistanis will be missing and have left no one wondering about their displeasure. Only the retired Australians will be here. But it is just preceding the T20 World Cup and just after a crowded season where everyone was playing everyone else. The Under 19 World Cup is happening in New Zealand and many young Indians will soon be tempted with money, big money. Yes, it is all waiting to happen. But my suggestion to people who are going to put their money where their mouth is, is to keep their hands carefully inside their pockets. Evaluate every opportunity with the care that it deserves. IPL is McGrath and Warne several times over in the magnitude of its aura. Bring back old fashioned Yorkshire wisdom to your decision-making lest you play a shot that Geoffrey Boycott would brand as “rubbish”.

(Ramanujam Sridhar is the CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly. Branding On Indian Turf".)

A week in the life of Jet Airways

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/catalyst/2008/10/30/stories/2008103050080200.htm

The efficient airline’s image has taken a beating with the events of the past fortnight..

The media-savvy employees protested, politicians took up their cause and Jet Airways reversed the decision to lay off a portion of its workforce.

I have a confession to make. Jet Airways is my favourite service brand. I have been a raving fan of the brand ever since it commenced operations and have been part of its frequent flier programme for as long as I can remember. I make a reference to t he brand at every forum where I am invited to speak and do so with even greater pride when the audience has foreigners in it. My usual statement introducing the concept of service and Jet Airways is “We Indians have to be pretty good at service as we have a long track record of service. After all we served the British for a small matter of 200 years!”

While that sounds pretty funny when it is said, I must hasten to add that despite our experience, Indians and Indian service providers probably more often than not are more likely to be classified as “unacceptable” or “below average” rather than “world class”, with Jet Airways being one of the few which might classify for the “world class” tag. And yet the same brand has been going through a fairly traumatic time over the last few days and in my own estimation the brand’s image has definitely been dented in the eyes of the general public and consumers of media if not in the eyes of the actual consumers such as me who still continue to patronise the brand come layoff or pink slip.

Sorry, we don’t need you

October 15 was a normal day for most Indians, but for 1,100 Jet Airways employees it was going to be an unforgettable day for all the wrong reasons as they were asked to leave the company immediately as the company was performing badly. The media went to town, breaking news and giving different counts of the number of employees who had been asked to leave. The unwanted employees seem to be ‘last in’ into the company and are probably feeling the brunt of the global downturn and have been ‘first out’ of the company’s rolls.

However, one must give credit to the beleaguered employees who did not take all this lying down and took to the streets, albeit in an orderly way, and demonstrated in front of every television camera and media reporter in the country shouting slogans and asking for their jobs back. The obliging media recorded every slogan and every interview, had a field day and ensured that the agitation was in the news for the entire 24 hours of the day. To add fuel to the fire every politician got into the act, every political party in the country (and we know the acute shortage of them at present) joined its voice in support, trade unions found one more cause to rally around all, adding to the overall media mayhem. I am not getting into the rumour that many Indian politicians own stock in Jet Airways as that is irrelevant to the piece. Coincidentally, a group of us were travelling to Thiruvananthapuram on October 16 for a customer service seminar being organised by Custommerce, a day after all this drama. So I politely told the (still) smiling girl at the Jet Airways counter that I would pray for her job’s safety at the Padmanabhaswamy temple when I went to Thiruvananthapuram. She in turn asked me to pray for her colleagues who had lost their jobs. The service on the flight was exemplary despite the obvious turmoil in the cabin crew’s hearts and Jet Airways and its employees went up one notch in my esteem.

Conscience over commerce

However, when I went into my room and switched on the TV set (normally my first act when I enter hotel rooms) the airline had done a U-turn. Naresh Goyal in a hastily convened press conference announced that he was taking back the entire lot of displaced staffers as his conscience was bothering him, he had been unable to sleep and his senior management (sic) had taken the decision without consulting him! The staffers were jubilant, just as the rest of India was a day later when Sachin Tendulkar broke Brian Lara’s record.
Lots of people claimed credit for the ‘conscience’ of Goyal and it is really great news for India that we have so many Good Samaritans in the political system, some of whom pioneered the ‘conscience vote’ in Parliament and continue to selflessly work for the nation’s progress without claiming the slightest credit! The trade unions in Bengal were cock-a-hoop and continued their celebrations as Saurav Ganguly scored a century and promptly changed their slogan to “Dada don’t go”.

But to my mind amidst all this tamasha and happiness of the staffers, Jet Airways suffered as more reports came in of its cutting routes and entering into a strategic alliance with Kingfisher, its arch rival, even as the atmosphere was rife with stories of bail-out packages. In the midst of all this life was going on as usual for the airline and its staff. I took two more flights in the same airline over the next two days and was relieved and delighted to see that the brand was renewing its commitment to service and taking the reverses to its image and the bad press in its stride, pampering ill-tempered and demanding customers like me, replacing my warm cup of tea with a piping hot one as the lemon slice that I asked for was delayed and continuing to smile at the spoilt and ill-behaved children who come on their flights.

The most significant part was that last week when I was returning from Mumbai, the flight had a really rough landing, frightening some of the chicken-hearted travellers like me who promptly remembered God in their hour of need! As we were preparing to leave the aircraft the pilot promptly apologised for the bad landing! Honesty in accepting one’s own sins of omission and commission gladden the hearts of consumers.
So why do I like Jet Airways? I think it is because of real, live, committed people who are serving me. Contrast this with Airtel which, in my eyes at least, has moved from a human, customer-friendly organisation to an automated , unconcerned corporation which hides behind technology. Can someone tell me how I can speak to a human being at Airtel? Maybe I should try Sunil Mittal!

So where does Jet go from here?

I am no expert on business strategy, least of all on the business of aviation which seems to be going through troubled times, to put it mildly. But I do know that customer satisfaction positively impacts stock prices, even if the stock market is currently chaotic. Take Amazon, whose CEO Jeffrey Bezos says with great conviction: “I’m so obsessed with the drivers of the consumer experience; I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by the customer experience.” In the Custommerce seminar that I mentioned, Geet Sethi, the renowned billiards player, described “passion” as a very weak word and spoke about “obsession” as crucial to success. Yes, a passion for customers should well be replaced by an obsession with customers and their needs.

It is also at times like these that companies are riddled with self-doubt, a bit like the Australian team that has just been handed its heaviest defeat in recent years, and start worrying about what they are doing. They resort to short-term measures such as cost control and give the customer and her service less importance than they deserve. They tend to forget the reason for their original success and pre-eminence over the years in the current preoccupation with economic turbulence. Stick to the basics, be obsessive about your customer, lobby with the government if you must and soon there could be a break in the current threatening clouds that are hovering so worryingly.

Strong brands will continue to prevail because of their customer centricity and Jet is one such brand. And what about the Australian cricket team to which some reference has been made and which has been a dominant brand for the last 13 years? It has competed with Jet Airways in the same period in the sort of media coverage that it has got, mostly unfavourable and maybe they need a bailout more urgently than the troubled airline! I do hope that Jet Airways will ride this crisis, in the interests of customers such as me who are just discovering what it is to be pampered!

(The author is a CEO, brand-comm, and the author of One Land, One Billion Minds)

One day, some day…

We love watching one day cricket and notwithstanding the recent aberrations where we have won important test matches abroad, one suspects that our players too prefer the shortened version of the game, whatever they may say to media. God knows that our test cricketers have played more one day internationals than players from any other country in the world. Despite the predilection of our administrators and cricketers for the shortened version of the game it must be mentioned that our skills leave a lot to be desired. Teams like Australia have moved to a different orbit, if one may use the word. The first major match{to my mind at least} of the enormously long world cup of 2007 was the much awaited game between Australia and South Africa when the two top teams crossed swords in the small ground at St.Kitts. That game showed up the difference between Australia and on occasion South Africa and the rest of the one day cricketing world. Also one needed to have watched the India England match at the Rose Bowl on Tuesday evening to understand that while India may be a fantastic one day team on some day or the other in the future it is certainly far from that today. At the time of writing this India is 1-3 down to England who is hardly an ideal one day side!
Aussie Aussie Aussie !

It is difficult to talk about one day cricket without talking about the Australians and their fantastic record in this aspect of the game and in others as well. It might be worthwhile to look at a few key aspects behind their success and maybe see where we are with reference to some of these proven success formulae. .Win the toss and? Australia would invariably bat first and put on runs on the board, choke up the opposition for 15 overs and then the asking rate would climb, the opposing team would commit hara-kiri. You get the picture. Contrast this with what Rahul Dravid has been doing in England recently. We bowled and badly at that, particularly at the Rose Bowl. And as England piled up the runs, we were on the back foot and continued to be there till we lost the match by a mile. A margin of defeat over 100 runs is equal to a defeat by an innings in a test match. Of course we can say that the conditions looked deceptive and Collingwood played along by saying that he too would have bowled. How often do captains demonstrate charity to their counterparts? Quite often in press conferences at least!! More than the conditions I think the Indians believe they can chase pretty well and our mind must go back to Srilanka when they visited here and our own success with the West Indies. Well the artificial lights in England are different and the English bowling at home is a different kettle of fish. In fact England’s few wins in the past including the much vaunted Commonwealth Bank tri –series win in the finals in Australia have had the same formula. I think the learning for India at least has to be not to be guided by the past but by the conditions. Here too I would be guided by Steve Waugh’s laconic view that the conditions cannot change dramatically in one hundred overs so the toss should not be too important though in India all of us agonise over every decision or non-decision of Rahul Dravid! The Australians play at a frenetic pace so even when wickets are falling the run rate stays at 6- 7 in the first 20 overs at least. The power plays are made to count. But I suppose it helps if you have Hayden, Gilchrist and Ponting batting in the first three slots with Clarke, Symonds and Hussey to follow. But Sachin and Sourav are no slouches except when it comes to running between the wickets. We often talk about why we do not need a coach. I wonder who will tell Sourav off after his appalling running between the wickets .Will it be the young Chandu Borde? The fact that Greg Chappell made a hash of his coaching stint should not make us believe that all coaches are bad or that we are great enough to play for ever without a coach. We need a coach who can teach running between the wickets definitely!

Demons in the mind or in the dressing room?

Another distressing habit that we have developed over the last few years in Indian one day cricket has been the frequent, unnecessary {in my view at least} changes that our batting order is subjected to. I cannot remember an occasion in recent times when Ricky Ponting has not batted at no.3.He will come in whether Gilchrist is out first ball or the score is 150 at the fall of the first wicket. Why does Dinesh Karthik have to shield Dravid who is arguably the best batsman we have? Dravid should theoretically get the best opportunity to score 150.He can do that only by getting at the top of the innings .Captaincy can play havoc over your thinking .Rahul Dravid has to remember that the greatest captaincy he can do is by playing a great innings first. The only game we have won on this tour in one dayers has been due to his fantastic batting at Bristol. I wish he has the same confidence in his batting that we have! Or is there something else that we do not know about?

Fielding, oh what a bore!

When we were at school and college, all of us would practice batting and bowling assiduously but by the time we had to do fielding it would be dark and we would all heave a sigh of relief. The Indian team sadly seems to suffer from the same malady. Romesh Powar who reminds me of Erapalli Prasanna in the way he tweaks his off spinners rivals the great man when it comes to immobility. How can young cricketers like him, Munaf Patel and even Gautam Gambhir be allowed to play a one day game with this level of fielding? The South Africans have demonstrated to us from the days of Jack Cheetham that fielding can and will make a difference to your team’s results. We all know that fielding is something that can be practiced and perfected even over a period of time. Even Monty Panesar is a far cry from his stumbling, bumbling efforts in Australia .Remember his well-flighted and yet accurate throw to get rid of Sourav Ganguly? It is really difficult to think of India winning close games if our fielders continue to let the ball rush for four through their feet, hands and bodies and dropping catches left, right and centre. Let us just get better fielders in like Suresh Raina even if he have some other cricketers whose batting reputations are better .That will improve our overall competitiveness which is now shakily resting on a few individual stars

Let us start at the bottom

India is close to the bottom of the one day cricketing pecking order or will soon be if we continue to field like this and run like headless chicken between the wickets. Soon three of our all time greats will no longer be able to play international cricket whatever the sponsors say .Let us blood more youngsters, give them more opportunities .Let us not expect anything from our team for the next 3-4 years. God knows that our expectations only puts unnecessary pressure on our players .Let us get a coach who is good. I remember the sad state of Australian cricket in the mid eighties and the difference that Bobby Simpson made to them .And let us not; even if we manage to win the remaining one dayers lose sight of one important fact. We have serious problems in one day cricket and the solution has to be long term not a quick fix that we are famous for. Let us be patient. For one day we shall rule the world!

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of One Land, One Billion Minds.)

The ICC drops the World Cup!

The 13th of June 1999 was a pleasant day at Headingley and it ended up being a memorable one. In a crucial match the pugnacious Steve Waugh who was battling bravely to keep Australia in the World Cup hit a ball in the air to Herschelle Gibbs, who in his anxiety to celebrate the catch, dropped the ball to the mortification of his teammates and the anguish of the South Africans in the crowd and at home. Steve Waugh is supposed to have made his since immortalised statement “You’ve just dropped the World Cup, son.” I can’t claim to have heard what he said from the stands, but I can definitely make the proud claim “I was there”. And yet 8 years later sitting unhappily in the Caribbean watching another World Cup, I can say with certainty if not with pride that ICC has taken its eyes off the ball and if the handling of the World Cup is any indication, it can certainly teach Herschelle Gibbs a thing or two about dropping the World Cup. To date and as I write this {SriLanka have just beaten New Zealand in another one sided encounter in the semi-finals} this has been one of the longest, most predictable, arguably the dullest and most certainly the worst organised World Cup that one has been part of. I know that it is perhaps unfair to blame the ICC for many of the ills of the current World Cup, but then there is an attendant risk to seeking publicity and credit for events and things that go right. Because when they do go wrong they seem to go horribly wrong and the ICC must stand up and take responsibility like Rahul Dravid instead of talking about the positives that are to be taken out of this event.

Cricket, lovely cricket
Cricket in the Caribbean is more than a mere game or so we were led to believe. It is the very fibre of life there. The land of Sir Garfield Sobers, the three W’s, the land of calypso magic….And it was with stars in my eyes that I went half way around the world-Bangalore to Frankfurt to Miami to St. Lucia to Barbados {Easily the most convoluted way of reaching there as I discovered later} We landed at St. Lucia ready for a scheduled 3 hour wait for a connecting flight to Barbados. A smiling Air Jamaica attendant tells us, even as we scowl, that the flight will be a mere five hours late!!! I am sure the ICC is hardly to blame for the airline’s ills!! But what followed was even more bizarre! It was a match day and I thought to myself that at least let me have the consolation of watching a match on TV as we waited. Imagine my consternation when I discovered that in an airport which is plastered with posters of the ICC cricket World Cup, at a venue where the second semi-final is to be held today, all the TV screens were blank on a match day! To me it seemed like home again where the cable operators are always asserting their independence! Of course I complained. Only to be told by a smiling attendant {these guys are smiling all the time} that I must mention it to the person in charge of tourism! Of course what one saw on TV wasn’t very heartening either and it must have been sadder for all those sponsors who had sunk in so much money on this non-starter of an event. Empty, silent stadia {Remember no musical instruments and just a few locals}.The cost of the match ticket, or so one heard, was higher than the weekly wage of the average West Indian. Food and drink were expensive and two of the matches that I saw finished by lunch which probably explained the pricing of the beverages!! There were no bell boys or ground attendants in sight!! Adam Gilchrist said it was unnerving to play to empty stands in the World Cup. Not that it deterred him from hoisting a few into the stands empty or otherwise. And for someone from India it was really strange to see this in Grenada. The ball was hit into the stands by one more Australian batsman and the Srilankan fielder had to jump over the pickets and dive under the benches to fetch it himself! Reminded me of my school games!! No one to watch and no one to fetch and even if you wanted to travel to watch the games, there was no transport. A fitting tribute to the world’s greatest, most hyped, most marketed and most heavily sponsored cricketing event!!


Why can’t the rest compete?
“Why can’t a woman be more like a man” is a song that many of us love to sing even if no one is listening. And to anyone watching cricket the question seems to be “Why can’t anyone beat Australia in the World Cup”. Though the ICC is certainly not responsible for this, the rest of the cricketing nations are to blame I suspect not the least of them the two “fancied” teams from the sub-continent India and Pakistan who did not even qualify to play them. The last time Australia lost a World Cup game was to Pakistan in 1999, which is a sad indictment of the way the rest of the world is playing but it certainly robs the game of its charm and to a certain extent the viewership. Of course Australia seems to have certain unfair advantages. The rest of the teams seem to have bats while they have given Mathew Hayden a bludgeon. The other teams struggle to make 150 while they make 300 without breaking into a sweat. Teams like England play test cricket in the power plays while Australia plays twenty-twenty. My disillusioned friend threatened to carry this banner to St. Lucia. “Every team I have supported so far has lost…C’mon Australia”. Yes only Australia can save this World Cup. By losing at St. Lucia or at the wonderful new Kensington Oval at Barbados!!

The entertainment is on
By the time the matches in Barbados started the ICC realised a few of its errors. It allowed food and musical instruments; it let locals in free after 11 am. One got the flavour of watching cricket in the Caribbean. The steel bands and the trumpets were cheery even if the big ticket game between Ireland and Bangladesh was not. The locals were friendly, the Barmy Army was there in huge numbers and actually booed their team politely after their humiliating defeat to South Africa! Looks like there are still a few things we can learn from our erstwhile rulers! Indians had become reconciled to their team’s absence and the banners changed from “India rocks, team sucks” to “Come back India all is forgiven”. The ICC continued to insist on “Park and Ride’ which meant that your car was parked miles away and you would actually drive past the stadium in the bus so that you walked back a mile before you saw the game! The announcers continued to struggle with the pronunciation of Jayasuriya’s name and insisted on announcing that Simon Taufel was officiating in the game when it was Billy Bowden!! Things like these are unacceptable and speak of poor organisation. And yet the bands, the dancing girls, the constant flow of liquour in the stands, the party stands where people at the end of the day did not know who won the game, were all high points for those who had other interests in life! But to the cricket fan and more worryingly for the sponsors this has been a damp squib, so far and we have just two matches to go before it comes to a sorry end.


Post match analysis
I am sure some of the sponsors have been here and gone through what some of us have experienced and while we can joke about it, I think there are serious issues to be addressed before going forward. If you made your decision to sponsor based on the hype then you would be in the same boat as us, who made the decision to watch live based on nostalgia for the game. Execution on the ground, literally, is critical in an event of this nature. And here for instance I saw one of the sponsors, IOC, playing a Hindi commercial in Grenada in an Australia, Srilanka game where the ground was full of Aussies wearing green and yellow! When one can spend millions on a sponsorship, does it make sense to play the same commercial on the big screen in the West Indies that you play in ‘Kyunki? ‘Will sponsors do a serious cost benefit analysis of this entire exercise and admit they have egg on their faces? Instead of asking the channels for their money back can they do a more stringent probability analysis of our own team’s performance before they put in their not so hard-earned money on events like this? And can the ICC realise and accept that it is quickly killing the golden goose by having long, boring tournaments like this one?

P.S. Maybe Herschelle Gibbs will exorcise the ghosts of the past and single-handedly beat the Aussies tonight and save the ICC!

P.P.S. Tough luck Herschelle! Come on Murali, do something!

Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO of brand-comm.

A hit-and-giggle or a laugh all the way to the bank?

2 p.m. on Tuesday 9th January 2007 is not prime time viewing in India. It was certainly prime time viewing in Sydney (where England and Australia were playing a twenty-twenty international match) and in the rest of Australia as well. It was not prime time viewing in England, 8.30 a.m. on a working day and England was getting thrashed to boot. But not withstanding the time, I sensed that I was seeing something extraordinary. The hit-and-giggle or the blow and guffaw as twenty-twenty cricket has been described seemed an amazingly entertaining thing to me at least. Without knowing too much about forecasting (other than knowing that it is not easy) I am still dumb enough to predict that this form of cricket is going to be an amazing marketing opportunity for the future for those brands that are aligned to cricket and even some of those that are not. While realising the total absurdity of a few forecasts made in the past by people far more illustrious than me, “a world market of about 5 computers,” “rock groups are on the way out” (while rejecting the Beatles) or “that atom bomb will never go off” - I am still going to stick my neck out and say that lots of people want entertainment, they want to have a good time and not spend the whole day at a cricket match. And the answer has to be twenty-twenty cricket.

Roll out the entertainment carpet
Too often cricket is not very entertaining. Certainly not the longer version of the game, at least to younger viewers, who are not die-hard cricket fans. Those fans like me who watch 5 day cricket matches realise that we are a dwindling if not dying breed. Empty grounds are common in the sub continent for test matches, as in countries like South Africa. England and Australia are better placed. But in India test cricket is losing steam and consequently viewership. While one can argue till the cows come home about the value and worth of test cricket, I think it is time for us to keep aside our personal predilections and biases and focus on consumers. They will love the shorter version of the game or should I say the shortest version of the game. And at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Ian Healy the wicket keeper turned commentator was walking around the stadium microphone in hand. He asked a young 8 year old girl who was at the SCG whether she had come for the Ashes test which happened the previous week and she said “Naw, daddy was there”. Is there a lesson? And she was having the time of her life – dancing girls, fireworks, 2 sets of DJs, players having microphones and sharing their views and most importantly a barrage of sixes – 14 in the Australian innings. And while the English fielders dropped 2 catches on the field, the crowd dropped 14 in the stands! An alarming drop in the fielding standards of Aussie crowds are an indication of the fact that twenty-twenty is getting a completely new genre of viewers and spectators. I think India is eminently ready for this new breed of entertainment. We love sixes. We love hoicks. And something tells me we will do well in this format.


Pajama cricket
The legendary Kerry Packer was responsible for revolutionizing cricket – night cricket, coloured clothing, world teams and huge crowds doing Mexican waves. But he got fairly bad press and conservative, traditional cricket fans and critics lambasted him. I can see a similar wave of criticism following twenty-twenty cricket. “It is for those with attention deficiency disorder” says one sarcastically. And this is really where marketers need to be careful. Critics are dime a dozen. They have a point of view. They too have a reader following which is in actual fact far less than they think it is. And they really are clueless about trends and are better at spotting trains! They could easily mistake a trend for a fad. Why is this shortest version a trend? It very simply typifies the times we live in. We live in a time compressed era. The only thing that we can wait for 9 months today is a baby. In contrast to some of us who waited 15 years for a Bajaj scooter!. A whole 20-20 game will take all of 3 hours. Batsmen will have to run out to the crease within 90 seconds. If India did what they did in the last test match when Saurav Ganguly came in place of Tendulkar after 7 minutes we may have been penalized 5 wickets! Players have ear pieces. Batsmen talk to the viewers even as they get ready to face the bowler. You are there with the batsman or the captain in the heat of it. We had an amazing situation in this match that I spoke about earlier where Gilchrist had just clobbered James Anderson for 2 consecutive sixes and the commentators urged him to go for a third one and he did precisely that! If it had been a few years earlier we might have thought that something was fishy. In this case someone merely had to fish the ball from the Bill O’Reilly stand. Yes innovation is the name of the game even if the game in question is a 200 year old game like cricket.

New customers
Everyone wants newer, younger customers. Set Max too in India is trying to do this using Mandira Bedi and other entertainers from Bollywood reminiscing about their childhood tennis ball cricketing days. But is that entertainment? I wonder. India’s win in the 1983 world cup and the world series of cricket in Australia opened up the floodgates of TV viewing in this country as your mother-in-law and mine started watching one day cricket. Some people have been loyal to the game, some have not. Viewership has waxed and waned with our own team’s fortunes. Contrast this with the high Ashes viewership in the recent Ashes series and England’s poorer viewership at home. People want their team to win. Twenty-twenty may give cricket viewership in this country a big shot in the arm as it will get new viewers in. People in India will take to it as enthusiastically as we did with one day cricket. The BCCI’s reluctance to accept this initially demonstrates its inability to spot a trend even if the trend gives it a kick in the butt.

So where’s the action?
2007 is a big year for cricket. India has just returned from a mixed tour of South Africa. Every other team is playing cricket in some part of the world or the other. Eight one dayers with the West Indies and Sri Lanka precede the magnum opus - the World Cup. Companies must be spending a lot of time, effort and money planning to be in this event, which is fair, but I still have a reservation about the timing of the telecast for Indian fans if not about our current form. My suggestion to marketers is this. Ask for a copy of the tape of the 20-20 match played at Sydney. Watch it with your family. You will like me, feel the excitement. You might even think about putting your money in the 20-20 world cup in South Africa in September. After all India may not have lasted 50 overs in a one day match but they will certainly last 20! But seriously think 20-20 if you want a different, younger audience. Think 20-20 if you want family viewing. I somehow think it won’t be a game of chance for marketers!

The author is Ramanujam Sridhar, CEO of Brand-comm.