Sudio Sudarsan is a recognized expert in branding of products, services, places, clubs, and movements. He focuses on the role of brand strategy in a digital culture, people/technology insight, social ideas and brand engagement planning.
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” － Confucius
We learn best by doing – ask any cricket coach; the only way you master a sport is by strapping on the pads and going to bat.
Of course there is value in reading and watching the game but with repetitive, unimaginative study too often those illustrative practices become little more than blunt weapons with which to beat any natural creative spark out of the student.
Education becomes little more than memorizing equations, formulae and concepts; regurgitate them in exams and valiantly keeping score.
And as we all know you can’t read the perfect game.
Involvement drives engagement; that’s why in my eight years as a Business School Professor I have become increasingly aware of the responsibility I have towards my students to prepare them for the world of business away from descriptive practices.
Conscious of the reality of the classroom, I teamed up with two progressively minded organizations, the Muthoot Group and Delhi Daredevils, to focus upon the problem of how to develop a novel experiential teaching tool.
Brand Battle Simulations took the practice of ‘war games’ a technique used by the US military to prepare their troops for the multiply eventualities of combat and applied it to the world of business.
As in a typical war game, student-teams take roles to simulate an unfolding crisis or gauge the possible reaction of competitors to a critical strategic move.
When recently teaching Brand Management, I invited the Directors of the Muthoot Group and the CMO of Delhi Daredevils to form control groups charged with presenting individual teams of up to ten MBA students with a scenario – imagined or real – about a current business crisis that they were then asked to solve.
With teams either playing the client, competition or a stakeholder I acted as the coach, guiding the student-teams to apply business theories, interpret secondary research, synthesize knowledge gleaned, and evaluate strategies.
Due to the nature of ‘play’ within a classroom environment, students felt free to think beyond the client brief to implement creative solutions to unforeseen problems while allowing clients to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities of their brand strategy.
‘Learn by Doing’ lectures make their apparent lack of formal planning their strength. In this model, a language teacher could aid learning by getting his class to act out scenes from a play or a short story, a science teacher could demonstrate the flammable nature of hydrogen by showing its effects with a little washing up liquid and a match.
The only limit placed on learning is the limits of your imagination.
While ‘learn by doing’ lectures may be nonlinear and rigid, they are always coherent and surprising. Beneath the seeming chaos in the classroom, there is always an underlying method that aids edification.
Like any good coach, educators are charged with getting the best from their students – to motivate and reward them through experiential teaching but too often our educational system stifles development with demonstrative pedagogic ideas.
The problems then left facing educators in this respect are familiar; students do not assimilate the necessary know-how and -why, and nor do they possess sufficient motivation to ask why these processes are critical to higher thinking.
The ominous problem remains; students know too much and do too little.
A growing self-awareness of the issue at hand has in effect crippled development in some of the premier business schools in the United States.
For instance, the Harvard Business School pioneered a case study approach to educating its students which attempted to tackle this malaise by fostering business education through a mix of theoretical reflection and deft application of the knowledge gained.
However, its modus operandi of promoting theoretical reflection became its primary value. Students were still no closer to experiencing practical business situations.
It seems unimaginable that any other profession would prepare their students to enter the world of work without giving them the necessary practical tools in which to succeed.
After all, you wouldn’t trust a surgeon who had only perused elaborate case studies, discussed them in the classroom and written eloquently on the subject if he has no practical experience of the operating theatre.
‘Hear one, see one, do one,’ is an adage used by residents to learn a procedure. In business education, however, the saying would be: “Hear one, talk about one, talk about another one.”
The reality is that what MBAs have to learn to be the managers of tomorrow they will have to do so within classrooms today – and how we are teaching them will only get them so far.
(Originally published by THE HINDU in Education Plus section on Monday, March 25, 2013)
Most advertising is kitsch; some of it is amusing; much is trash. But, those brilliantly communicated ideas that garner enormous cultural attention amply justify why advertising should not be construed as annoying legerdemain, economic waste, or cultural dross. Here are some of 2012′s brilliant advertisements made for TV and reused on YouTube:
10. Dollar Shave Club, “Our Blades are F***ing Great”
Agency: Paulilu Productions
Los Angeles, USA
9. Adidas, “Take the Stage”
Agency: Sid Lee
London, England
8. Guinness, “St. Patrick’s Day”
Agency: AMV BBDO
London, England
7. EMDA, “Alzheimer Awareness”
Agency: ACW Grey
Tel Aviv, Israel
6. Chrysler, “It’s Half Time in America”
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy
Portland, OR; United States
5. ETN, “Howling Football”
Agency: Ambient Advert
Berlin, Germany
4. LG, “Smart Thief”
Agency: Y&R
Amsterdam, Holland
3. Barack Obama, “Obama for America”
Agency: Bully Pulpit Interactive
Washington DC; United States
2. P&G, “Best Job”
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy
Portland, OR; United States
1. Red Bull, “Red Bull Stratos”
Agency: Riedel Communications
Filmed near Roswell, NM; United States (FlightLine Films)
THE POWER OF brands is undeniable. The moment we decide to buy soda, we know what brand of soda we’d purchase even before we leave our apartments to the corner store. Brands create unmatched loyalty and boundless profits for corporations. What’s it about brands that transforms people’s emotions and behavior? Why should a pair of jeans from True Religion inspire such an emotional response and commitment. Why should MBAs who graduate from Thunderbird or bikers who ride a Harley ink the logo of the brand to claim membership to an exclusive clique?
In 2007, I embarked on a journey to find out the answer(s) how brands create devotion strictly from the consumer’s perceptive. My journey took me to ashrams in India, secret consumer tribe conventions, Sturgis and Daytona motorcycle rallies, Apple stores, tattoo parlors across the length and breadth of the US, and many other exciting places. I am still collecting valuable data with plans of publishing my findings. This keynote presentation uses four iconic brands: Coca-Cola, Apple, Thunderbird, and Motorhead. I hope this set of slides helps unlock some of the secrets of how brands build emotional connections, and why branding is important.
Rationality does not cut any ice with the lizard brain. You appeal to it at a deeper level, and when you do, the keys to brand success are found.
We have only just scratched the surface of our potential – like icebergs at least 98% of our emotional and intellectual awareness occurs ‘under the surface’ in the murky depths of the subconscious mind1.
It would be disingenuous to dismiss this when approaching the all-encompassing practice of Marketing Research; after all, an iceberg wouldn’t even reach the surface without this sturdy base below.
So why do market researchers only focus on that 2% rather than engaging with those core beliefs that keep that smaller percentage visible?
Here’s a lesson from my graduate school days: A friend of mine, fresh from his native country and in the US less than a week stumbled upon a way to earn a quick buck. He registered himself to take part in a focus group for consumers who loved to eat Mac and Cheese straight from the box.
In his native country, breakfasts are as freshly cooked as they are varied – they didn’t even sell Mac and Cheese; however for his insights into this largely unknown delicacy he received a cool $100. He even showed me the T-Shirts and CDs he brought with his Mac and Cheese money.
My friend displayed the basic human characteristics that we all take for granted; those impulses that lie above the surface. We as a species, driven by a collective consciousness that elevates intelligence as a desirable quality, even in the lack of that quality, will strive to appear intelligent.
Such social performances can come in myriad forms – artful omissions, the provision of incomplete or misleading information, outright deception, faking, lying, carefully chosen words, persistence, bullshitting, and so on.
This deceptive behavior does not have any power; it is only when someone believes in the manipulation that its power manifests itself. In an interview, Vasudevi Reddy of University of Portsmouth claims:
“Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing was wrong.” 2
In this case, it’s a question of dignity: the infant knows the parameters in which it will be most successful. Now, think about adults; Do any of these responses sound familiar?
“Honey, you look perfect in that dress!”
“Oh, your e-mail must have ended up in my spam folder; that’s why I didn’t respond!”
“Your updates never show up on my Facebook newsfeed.”
Both women and men consciously fabricate these face-saving stories. In one out of ten interactions, married couples lie to each other, and such made up incidents skyrocket to 80% in the context of spending. 3
Stepping back from spending for a moment; I recently eavesdropped in on a conversation on my daily train ride to work. A forty-something, suit-wearing professional was boasting to her companion about how she had hoodwinked a focus group that called for participants who were paid subscribers to Skype. Just hours before she was due to take part in the market research study, she googled everything she need to know about the survey and lied through her teeth all her way to $300 in participation money.
My question here is: What’s the use in spending tons of money in carrying out elaborate market research sessions – asking the neocortex or the rational mind, questions about irrational behaviour?
The logical side of our brain is only going to lie or act as if it were intelligent. Truth is often the first casualty of any conflict, and there is no greater conflict than that between the consumer’s beliefs and their buying behavior. Don’t believe me? Keep reading:
The irrational buying behavior of the average consumer was put on display during recent consumer research for an 11powerN client. Several New Yorkers were asked why they drove a SUV on the streets of Manhattan. Oddly enough, the number one response was: ‘What if I chose to go off the road?’ Keep in mind this is Manhattan. Manhattan. You remember: the financial and cultural nexus of the US? Manhattan the island? Off-road? The more I probed, the weirder their responses got; “Oh it’s because I go off-roading at weekends.”
As amusing as those responses are even if consumers were downright truthful; how do they put their irrational buying behavior or the emotions they have for a product, service, or experience into words?
Today’s marketers recognize a very distinct “ebb and flow” of an emotional wave influencing the consumer’s choices; this recognition, however, does not extend to the identification of an emotional connection that can bridge the gap” and afford any sort of measurement of an association of that magnitude. Given the existence of this reality and its attendant limitation, one must ask: Is the expenditure of funds in extending this elaborate market research helping or hindering the marketer in understanding this emotional connection? To what end should the marketer seek to find in asking the rational mind questions about irrational behavior?
If presented with rational thought and behavior, the neocortex will have no choice but to lie – that is, to “act out” as if it were intelligent.
Fish where fishes are. Answers to subconsciously driven motives need to be sourced at the subconscious level. Market researchers have a duty to extract the subconscious agents that make decisions, preferences, feelings, and beliefs by probing into the subconscious or ‘the lizard brain’ as I’d like to call it.
The lizard brain is not mutually exclusive; it pervades every dimension of our lives. It doesn’t shut down when we go to bed or go on vacation. Every second, it is dictating how one should act, judge, think and feel.
Theologians, philosophers, and scientists have been studying the unconscious to know why we do what we do for several centuries. Half a century ago, Ernest Dichter, the founder of motivational research, helped launch in-depth consumer interviews to explore non-rational motivations in consumers when marketers still believed in the homo economicus.
In the last decade or two, there have been a host of tools developed by social psychologists, cultural anthropologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, and economists that have given marketers a peeping hole into this lizard brain or reptilian complex.
Lizard harbors vast riches in still largely unmapped areas immersed in deep emotions, traditions, values, and culture. Marketers who see the advantage in wandering into this dimly-lit treasure trove will be richly rewarded with the keys to brand success.
References
LeDoux, Joseph (1998). “The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life,” New York, NY: Simon and Schuster
ONE OF THE least pleasant aspects of a professional’s job is the need to put things in a presentation format and present it. Almost everyone finds it a chore and wishes he were better at it. And many people are told specifically that they need to improve if they want to progress. Look no further. For a person who seeks to learn, I’ve put down seven important points below:
(1) Use Pyramid Structure:
How do we remember telephone numbers? We group them. 773-399-0773 (that’s my old Chicago telephone number!). Any grouping of ideas is easier to comprehend if it arrives presorted into its pyramid. This suggests that every slide should be deliberately structured to form a pyramid of ideas.
(2) Need for Logic:
It is not enough simply to group ideas or bullets in a logical way in a slide without also stating to yourself what the logic of the relationship is. This means that instead of remembering bullets, you remember bullet categories into which bullets fall. As a presenter, you are thinking one level of abstraction higher, because thought-transfer is at a higher level.
(3) Order Top Down:
Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to presenting. The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized. And, the individual ideas better be well-thought to answer in advance any questions audience may have. In other words, first the conclusion – like a newspaper headline – then the beef.
(4) Create an Image to Recite Story:
Tell a story. If you can’t tell, at least please do not orally state what is on the slide. Audience can read on their own.
“Near the end of March 1845 I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber..it was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where the pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water.” - Henry David Thoreau
As you took Thoreau’s words, did you not build up a sort of mental picture in your mind, to which you added details as you took in successive phrases and sentences? Malcolm Galdwell (“The Tipping Point,” “Blink”) is a persuasive orator. In fact his presentation at SXSW 2005 is rated on par with Steven Jobs’ Mac introduction of 1984 or Gore’s emotive presentation of global warming. People love Malcolm because he is a story teller. He doesn’t lecture; he paints a picture. With simple colors. He does more with less.
(5) The Power of Pause:
Even if you memorize your speech, force yourself to pause. Never utter hmms and aahs. Just pause. It’s profound. Even if you don’t lose your breath, please pause. Even an ordinary address seems elegant with the power of pause.
(6) Fail to Plan is Plan to Fail:
Mark Twain once said, “It takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” It makes sense to practice your presentation with a tape recorder and in front of a mirror.
(7) Body Talks more than the Tongue:
Use your limbs as you modulate your tone. Be passionate. Stretch your limbs. Ooze energy. Get audience motivated. Walk around. Involve the audience. Leave handouts.
Some remarkable discourses the world witnessed:
Guy Kawasaki, “The Art of the Start,” TiECon 2006
Steve Jobs, “Introduction of Macintosh,” 1984
Tom Peters, “A Ham Sandwich,” 1990
Dick Hardt, “Identity 2.0,” OSCON 2005
Hans Rosling, “Global Trends in Health and Economics,” TED Talk 2006
Good is to deliver a notch above to exist in a consulting firm; great is to go way beyond. Mastery means own and empower along the way and all the way.
CONSULTING FIRMS are in the business of renting out brains; the most valuable asset in a consultancy is human capital. Consequently, consulting firms scour top business schools for the best problem-solving brains, purposefully making the selection process emotionally and intellectually intense. Once aboard, everyone around the consultant seems as a reflection of the consultant or scarily they may appear better qualified than the consultant. And yet, six to ten years into consulting, only few transcend to thought leaders, empowering partners.
Arguably, attitude, brains, capability, and diligence give much comfort to function - not mastery to perform consulting. It is fallacious to assume the only goal of consulting is to provide advice toward solving problems, when the challenge most clients face is producing the strategic change itself. To produce that change in a client organization, the inventories of theories, models, tools, and techniques are required but seldom adequate.
Good is the enemy of great. Good consultants view that their work for clients ennobles them; masterful consultants, on the other hand, view themselves as ennoblers of their work to clients. To elaborate the quantum difference between good and masterful consulting, let us consider two important aspects of management consulting:
(1) Interaction at various levels with client organization
(2) Creation and management of knowledge
No two business organizations are alike. Every organization has a culture, a pattern with which the entire organization views, believes, and grows. Most organizations, however, can be compartmentalized into five, levels (as shown in figure above) based on structural power within the organization. Consultants often interact at all the levels of a client organization. Usually the executive management anticipated change to be brought about in their organization resulting in hiring a consultancy to seek advice, expertise, or validation.
Levels 1-3 are rarely embrace change because of functional inertia and unitary mindset driven through insecurities, intense competition with peers, reluctance to let go, and other human behavioral factors. Consultants pursue, analyze, and articulate research, and collect the fee. As change agents, however, masterful consultants build consensus as partners, not as experts with middle managers and team leaders of client organizations. Typically the progress and/or milestones of the consulting project are familiarized to the executive management (level 4,5) in steering committee meetings. At such important meetings, masterful consultants create copious ownership opportunities for middle managers and team leaders, call it client-centered consulting. The client-centered approach stands in shining contrast to other approaches which other consultants may adopt namely, consultant- or consultancy-centered, or strategy-centered, or task-centered approaches. Client-centric consulting cannot be used in a piecemeal fashion to produce mastery; it is a shared responsibility, a committed interactive approach. As the parent guides the child, the masterful consultant guides the client so that both own the process of change. The consultant empowers the client to own the outcome, the change itself, in deeper levels of the organization enabling faster and smoother transition. On the consulting side of the spectrum, masterful consultants may not be as sharp or current as new MBA hires, but they differentiate themselves in the way they hold, apply, and communicate knowledge.
The theories and models are tacit in the background of their awareness, but their explicit use of the knowledge to reveal simple patterns is holistic and systemic. Masters don’t pretend or present themselves as knowers to answers, which itself is a humbling sight. Instead they are empathetic curators creating the perfect platform to discover the outcome with their clients. Yet there is more to consulting than knowledge creation. The problem is not the lack of knowledge, but the inability to act on the knowledge. Masterful consultants do not merely relay the knowledge in the form of a keynote presentation or a report with charts and graphs; they go the distance to apply the knowledge and implement the change with the client. Know what you know. More importantly, know what you do not know. Don’t give advice; just ask great probing questions.
Dr. Mary Sully de Luque, Ph.D. teaches courses in Leadership at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona USA. Earlier when she served as a post doctoral research fellow at the Wharton School with Dr. Robert House, Ph.D., she co-authored the seminal, ten-year research work, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Countries.
The most intimate team to its fans, the cricket brand of the common man, CSK, triumphs the kitsch of Bollywood and the pursestrings of India’s rich to be the most valuable IPL cricket team.
MOST OF THE greatest sports brands today are American: Nike (sportswear), Super Bowl (sporting event), Tiger Woods (sports personality), ESPN (sports channel), and New York Yankees (sports club). At least with the list of world famous sports clubs, a new one from the Third World needs to be included.
India has a long-standing love affair with a game called cricket, a quintessentially British sport played as “creckett” in the sixteenth century, and popularized by the British Empire in the subcontinent since early 1800s. Today, three in every ten TV commercials will carry a cricketing theme or endorsed by India’s cricket heroes. In the new millennium, cricket went through an overhaul – truncated to twenty overs a side and a result could be gotten in three hours – about as long as a baseball game – right for an evening’s Hulk Hogan-style entertainment. Playing the role of a patriarch, the Board of Cricket Control in India, muscled its power to trample Indian Cricket League (ICL) calling it unlicensed and banning many international players, and borrowed many ideas from the first T20 World Championship hosted by South Africa to form its own glitzy version, the Indian Premier League (IPL).
The IPL was set up to imitate the franchise model of American sport – a very cosy family business. And even if India’s biggest film stars and richest hard-nosed tycoons who own many of these cricket clubs continually crave for the spotlight on themselves, the effulgence of IPL seized every cricket lover’s attention, and was subsequently appraised at a whopping $3.7 billion by Brand Finance, a London-based consulting firm that specializes in brand valuation. India’s rising middle class embraced this hit-and-giggle version that was devised by England in 2003, as a way of reviving interest to its county cricket after five straight years of failing attendances. With this new acquired brand of T20 cricket, India’s city-based franchisees had truly come of age with one clear winner: Chennai Super Kings (CSK).
From a branding perspective, CSK, declared as the most valuable IPL franchisee (again valued by Brand Finance, London), began to differentiate itself, and amply benefitted from the high level of identification of power symbols and a sensory palette of unique visual, verbal, and digital expression. As a veteran in branding and specializing on consumer insight and technology, I’d award CSK full marks in every facet of the complex branding process, especially the potential to build equity by capitalizing on the emotional relationship it shares with CSK fans who derive strength and a sense of identity from their affiliation with their team.
Brand Identity Elements:
Branding experts may brood about the lack of poetic ingenuity in having two kings and two royals among the handful IPL teams. Some may assume that the CSK brand name was partly inspired or downright inherited from the defunct Chennai Super Stars. The “king of the IPL jungle” symbolism traces back to Pallava dynasty who combined the iconic lion emblem with other symbols like the Swastika, Srivatsa, and the Trisula in their copper plate seals. The descriptor “super” – Tamils’ overused fuzzword – everything is “super” from morning coffee to their favorite cinema star.
While every IPL team is adorned in a variant of blue- or red-colored jersey with gaudy silver or gold streaks, the CSK cricketers refresh the eyes in bright yellow. A roaring lion is used as a visual symbol, and Chepauk, the home of CSK, is referred colloquially as the lion’s den.
Brand Attribute and Value:
For brand success the product or in this case the entire gaming experience, needs to be perceived as quality-laden, providing adequate value for money. While non-cricketing attributes matter in IPL, the success of a sports club depended chiefly on the core competitiveness of cricket players, i.e., their abilities. CSK’s winning consistency in the short history of the IPL has transformed a brand into a cultural phenomenon: five times in the playoffs (including IPL 2012), three-time finalists, twice winners of the IPL crown, and once winning the Champions League in 2010.
CSK is the only team that does not cast light on its owners. Instead, it has cast light on the authentic game it plays. You can see it when CSK is on: the camera is on its players – not on the owner’s snooty family. When pursestrings become visible, you know that a sports brand is in peril because it isn’t lit by its cricketing splendor, but ignited by the vulgar stare of money. Other bells and whistles in the three-hour extravaganza, such as a percussionist drumming a dancing beat alongside the outsourced cheerleaders still colorfully prevail.
Organizational Attributes:
Barring CSK, all IPL teams hired local players to only fire them in player auctions in American corporate style; for instance, there is no sense of “Bengaluru” in Royal Challengers; even their all-conquering son, Rahul Dravid, was imperturbably relinquished to play for the namesake, the other Royals. A cricket player performs three roles in the IPL: functions as a member in the squad, if selected plays for the team, promotes the brand, and endorses as the primary spokesperson. If team owners rule with an iron rod and let their players go off in a merry-go-round, the fans tend to switch their loyalty, resulting in fan alienation that the clubs may have avoided in the first place. Brand confusion is very evident with Deccan Chargers’ fans: they cheer for Adam Gilchrist who plays now for Kings XI and their club travels as vagrants from Vizag to Cuttack.
CSK did not do different things; it only did things differently. CSK kept the same team rooster for the most part in the five years IPL has been in full-swing. The traditional value of developing the best local talent was continued as the bulk of the side, including Murali Vijay, Ravichandran Ashwin, Srikanth Anirudha, and Subramaniam Badrinath, and Yo Mahesh moved up through Tamil Nadu cricket. The highest wicket-taker in the world, Muttiah Muralitharan, a Tamil, was only forced to let go after a competing IPL team outbid CSK.
It is the only franchise that invested $5 million to revamp on its creaking infrasturcture and increase seating capacity to 50,000; today Chepauk boasts of quad conical geometric form roof and bright yellow-colored stands. There definitely is a sense of belonging and empathy with which CSK has been branded.
Customer Internalization:
Just as how Chelsea F.C. is a play thing for Roman Abramovitch; IPL teams may very well be a play thing for the highfaluting businessmen. Not Chennai. CSK exudes a persona of a people’s brand, while other teams depend on a Bollywood ring master to goad its fans inside and outside the playing field. With any sports team brand, the fan’s internalization process is very elemental, and in this digital age, CSK fans are taking their favorite team right to the streets via social media outlets. If you don’t know that CSK fans are the most appreciative cricketing audience in the world, you need to drop an e-mail to the former Pakistani opener, Saeed Anwar, or ask someone from the Pakistan cricket team of 1999 who did a lap of honor. CSK fans, like their team, are a cog in the machine. This sense of “we” is pivotal in any sporting culture, and this sense of fan inclusivity is evident in the myriad videos on social media channels made by CSK fans for CSK fans (featured below is one made in San Francisco, CA, USA going viral right now on YouTube as this article is written).
CSK as an innovator initiated a few novel schemes be it the Mongoose bat in 2009 or their catchy “Whistle Podu” and “Raise your Hands” jingles to seduce fans worldwide. Last year, CSK fans broke into the “Whistle Podu” song and dance at Landmark, a book store chain in Chennai, proving that promotion today is democratic in the digitized world of social media and viral videos.
The restaurants and bars are riding the CSK wave by offering their guests CSK-styled menu (see below Park Sheraton’s Cricket Mania Menu).
Fostering Brand Loyalty:
In the past 5 years since IPL’s inception, CSK has about 1.5 million (consolidated) fans on Facebook; New York Yankees has about 5 million. But, the Yankees was established back in 1901 – CSK only in 2008. CSK legend, Matthew Hayden, has a photostream on Flickr.com posting pictures from CSK dressing room and cementing ties with CSK fans (search for ID TheHaydenway). CSK continually tweets and keeps its subscribers and fans engaged by giving away awards and rewards, while the players directly promote the CSK summer sports and casual apparel collection online via YouTube videos (see below) fostering a more direct relationship with fan base.
I was in awe when my friend’s octogenarian grandmother spent $5,000 and went on her own to Salt Lake City, UT to support Chicago Bulls in the 1998 NBA finals. She proudly wore the Chicago Red in the road games against Jazz. After almost a decade when I moved to London, England, I realized that New York Yankees transcended as an icon of the world – Londoners wore Yankees’ merchandise in a similar New Yorker pride – I’ve seen many with the NYY logo tattooed in permanent ink. So far, I have spotted a handful CSK fans in their yellow jerseys in New York and New Jersey this season. Scores of CSK fans congregate on groups in social media outlets. For instance, “Second Slip” is the most popular hang-out on Facebook (restricted admission). With the social web democratization, the CSK brand emerges as a sports club of the people by the people and for the people out of all IPL teams. In a few years I am sure to see the CSK’s roaring lion logo, tattooed and commodified like Oakland Raiders or New York Yankees.
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Should you wish to connect with the author: @iSudio on Twitter
For author’s insights and thinking in branding, marketing, or strategy, please find his keynote presentations at: http://www.SlideShare.net/SudioSudarsan You should be able to download them for free.
Clio, one of the most recognized global awards for advertising, has named India’s Piyush Pandey, Creative Director of Ogilvy, as the recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award. He will honored at the 53rd annual awards ceremony on Tuesday, 5/15/2012 at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
Piyush Pandey joins the ranks of such industry stalwarts and previous award winners as Tony Kaye, David Abbott, Neil French, Sir John Hegarty, Bob Greenberg, and Bob Isherwood.
His campaigns for Fevicol, Vodafone, and Cadbury’s have won him international accolades and bear testimony to his insight, humor, intelligence, and intellect.
