Are you struggling to position your brand and connect with your target audience? Vivek Sethia, Founder & CEO of India on Track, breaks down how the world’s newest and largest companies stay front-of-mind, particularly by leveraging the power of sports.
Whether you're a scrappy startup or an established industry giant, sports marketing can help you build brand awareness, shape consumer perceptions, and even drive direct sales. Vivek highlights companies such as Red Bull and Aether to explain the different strategies of sports marketing. The key is choosing the right properties to partner with - ones that authentically reflect your brand's values and aspirations. Done right, sports marketing can be the catalyst that propels your business to new heights.
0:00 The Sports Marketing expert
2:11 Examples of companies leveraging sports marketing
4:45 How to build your brand through sports marketing
9:05 Why do brands do marketing?
13:43 How to get started in sports marketing
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The distance to becoming a billion dollar organization that distance is the shortest these days. You can be a tech company, you can become a billion dollar organization in two years, three years, heck one year, you know, and this timeline used to be much larger, 20 years back, 15 years back. So what is happening is that there is becoming a need to position yourself far quicker than it used to be earlier. So what is the ethos of your company? What do you stand for? Now this is more of a subconscious level feeling that if I look at Apple, what do I think? If I look at Red Bull, what do I think? If I look at Arida's, what do I think? So this positioning is leveraging sports marketing. This positioning becomes much easier to create. So the new brands that are becoming big very quickly, they can use the power of association, fire associate with golf, if I associate with Olympics, if I associate with UFC, what is the message that I'm giving the people who are consuming my brand? You're listening to 15-minute mastery, a show that empowers you with insights from leading iGaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the AI-powered data analytics platform Blask and supported by Ted driven affiliate and media company already media. Lola stars the leading casino partnership program and next.io, the world's iGaming community. Hi everyone and welcome to 15-minute mastery. We got someone who is a very long-term friend of mine, someone whom I proud to call brother. We got Vivek Seria, a founder and the CEO at India on track, which is probably one of the India's largest sports marketing agencies. Amongst clients, we got India Premier League, La League, Chelsea, Major League Bus, Baseball and India on track and Vivek himself not only helping these brands on building their businesses in India, but they also helped them to grow the business using the help of the sports marketing, which is going to be one of the topics of this conversation. Hey Vivek, it's so nice to have you here with us. Hi Dimitri, great to connect and really excited for this. Thanks for having me. You're actually one of the probably largest and fastest growing influencers in India and I really enjoy watching your channel as well and I've seen you discussing so many cool topics in your channel and I really want to use your head to go in deep in terms of the sports marketing and I want to start with one little question beforehand. So can you give us examples of the businesses which you've seen explode in through the help of the sports marketing? Yeah, absolutely. There are so many brands that have leveraged the power of sport and the audience, like Red Bull is one of the best examples that comes. I mean, it's a drink which is typically not necessarily a sports drink. It's more mostly in the bars and the night caffeinated, but how they've leveraged sport to bring the ethos of the brand forward? Like they want people to feel that if you're consuming Red Bull, you are taking action, you are in a thrill and that just resonates with what they do. And it's not just sports marketing, they've bought Formula One teams, they've done all these amazing pieces of content, they've also invested in cricket in India. So they go to these different markets and leverage the power of what sports communicates because it's not necessarily what the sport itself is, but what sports communicates and then resonate with that feeling in the heart of the sports audience, that this sport I follow, this is the brand that's really, I resonate with this brand through this feeling. So there are lots of these brands. I mean, I have another example based out of India, there is an EV company, Ether. Nobody knew about this company. They were making bikes, electric vehicles. And two years ago, they sponsored one of the Indian Premier League teams, the cricket teams. And boom, right from, so they were in a very different stage from what Red Bull is, which is a far more established brand. So Ether is a new brand. So depending on where you are in your cycle, sports can be a vehicle to connect with the customers, potential customers and consumers. And for them, it was more about discovery. People discovered their brand through the power of cricket. So yeah, there's lots and lots of such examples where companies have really benefited from leveraging sport. Well, I really liked your example about Red Bull. And even though I'm not a fan of energy drinks, but I think the power of the brand they've built makes me really want to become a consumer, which is quite powerful. I'm not that picky in terms of what kind of companies I'm following, et cetera. So I think this beautiful example leads me to probably the topic of the whole conversation, how Red Bull and any other brands in the world, leveraging sports marketing to build a powerful brand. And I want you to try to guide us through a list of key steps a business needs to take to leverage sports marketing to build a powerful brand. Correct, absolutely. See, everything like any business, any marketing campaign or any marketing agenda, everything starts with the objective, right? So I'll break it down into three types of companies that can leverage sports marketing. On step number one, our companies, which are fairly new, they want to establish themselves. They don't have a clear positioning ready in the minds of the customers. Step number two is you go further along, you have more established brands like the example of Red Bull and others and how they can leverage. And at the third level, we'll also talk about direct sports brands that can really directly leverage the fans. So let's look at the first one first. So there are lots of companies now in the world of technology and in the startup environment, all over the world, new organizations are must-rooming like literally on a daily basis. And this is the time in the world where it has become like the distance to becoming a billion dollar organization. That distance is the shortest these days. You can be a tech company, you can become a billion dollar organization in two years, three years, heck one year, you know. And this timeline used to be much larger, 20 years back, 15 years back, right? So what is happening is that there is becoming a need to position yourself far quicker than it used to be earlier. So what is the ethos of your company? What do you stand for? Now this is more of a subconscious level feeling that if I look at Apple, what do I think? If I look at Red Bull, what do I think? If I look at Adidas, what do I think? So this positioning is leveraging sports marketing. This positioning becomes very much easier to create. So the new brands that are becoming big very quickly, they can use the power of association. If I associate with golf, if I associate with Olympics, if I associate with UFC, what is the message that I'm giving the people who are consuming my brand? And choosing the right sport and choosing the right, rights holders within sport can really make or break how the brand is being perceived. One of the examples I gave and we had a little bit of a hiccup was this brand called Aether. It's an electric vehicle brand in India. Nobody knew about it. They had a phenomenal product, but the positioning and the marketing was completely missing. So what they did was about two years back, just partnered with one of the IPL teams. It was a new team that stood for aggressive play, that stood for young people getting promoted, they had a young captain, a young team and they partnered with them and then just ran with a two-year campaign and that was the cornerstone of their marketing. And what people like us who consume a lot of cricket and this is people all over the world that consume Indian Premier League, they looked at that brand and said first was curiosity, like who are these guys? And then since this was their marquee investment in marketing, this became the attributes of the brand. So for new organizations, leveraging the right partner in sport and connecting with that audience with that right feeling is a phenomenal opportunity. And that's why I always look at younger brands and I, we advise them that don't do too many things. If sport is the right audience for you, pick one and invest in that sport, invest in that property. So that is one. If you look at the second aspect of it which is typically more established organizations, the likes of a Coca-Cola, likes of a Red Bull, likes of an Aridas, Apple, so on so forth, their biggest marketing challenges recall. I remember when I was at business school in the US, the CMO of Pepsi had come to visit and which bigger brand than Pepsi to talk about marketing. And I was always curious, I was really young, but I asked him one question, it's like if Pepsi and Coke both decide that we freeze our marketing budgets for six months or three months, then will it really hamper your market share, but you'll save like millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. And I still remember the answer he gave me is like we are not necessarily always competing against each other, we are competing against just mind space. It's not that I am thirsty so I want to drink Pepsi. It's more like Pepsi has created something in my mind that triggers that this is the time for a Pepsi. It's not always thirst. So that really stood with me like that, that key message that he gave me. And a lot of the established brands, they just want to be there consistently. So if we take the example of an Aridas, you have to be a technical partner of various clubs at various times and you keep juggling. You've got the real Madrid, do you really need the Manchester United? Of course, there's a sales angle to it as well which we will talk about. But I think for the more established brands, it is the power of being in front of recall, which is the most important. And when you talk about sport, if you look at the US, if you look at baseball or basketball, the brands that are advertising there are tech companies that want to be in front of you all the time. They are consumer goods that are, they want to be in front of you all the time. So when you are more far along in the product life cycle, you are more established brands, then sport plays a different role. It's a more recall based role. When you're a new company, it's a very different role because you're building perception. And the third kind of companies are companies that can actually make business directly from sport. You can sell jerseys, you can sell drinks, you can sell food, you can have customers that can buy technology. And there, some of the best examples are like, what really fascinates me is McDonald's and Olympics. It's so counterintuitive because when you think of McDonald, it's kind of like junk food and not so healthy. But when you think of sport, it's a lot about fitness and health and so on so forth. But when they do collaborate, it somehow just still works. But for McDonald's, it's also a great sales point. So when you're in a World Cup or in an environment like Olympics and you say, you can only buy my food or you can only buy my jersey, it creates a tremendous amount of selling opportunities. So sports marketing in essence can play a different role for different types of companies. But at the end of all of this is the emotion of the customer, of the consumer. If I'm a fan of the UFC and if there is stake, which is the platform that UFC promotes, then the likelihood of me using stake over some other brand is much higher. And that's the feeling that fans that brands can leverage for the fans. Well, thank you so much Rick and absolutely love your answer and your thinking here. And while you were talking about the mind space and the competition for the mind space of the consumer, it led me to another beautiful example where the CEO of Nintendo, he said that we're not competing against Sony, we're not competing against Xbox or Microsoft. We're competing for the time a human can spend on the entertainment throughout the day. This can be working with the family in the park, going to the cinema, playing football with friends. So it's essentially a free entertaining time for the consumer. So I really like your example as well. So just to try to summarize what you've mentioned. So if we can like, obviously like running the marketing is one. And if we're talking about the brand marketing, a lot of companies probably are so afraid of running the brand marketing because they don't know how to evaluate the performance of the business based on the brand marketing. So you mentioned the three type of companies. So if you will be able to explain more a little bit about the benchmarks, these companies can be setting for them or some metrics they can use to be able to evaluate the success of their sports market in campaigns while building their brands and businesses. Yeah, absolutely. See, one of the big mistakes that most companies make is they evaluate sports marketing purely from a media perspective. So for example, if my logo is flashing on the jersey of a football club, let's say I'm Emirates with Arsenal. And if Emirates is only looking at the exposure of the logo during the course of the season, and then creating a media evaluation of that, and if that is really the only parameter, it'll probably never make sense. Because of course, that has to be one of the parameter, one of the parameters because you are buying media. This is prime time real estate, you are buying media, you evaluate that against what happened if we had placed ads. But then there's a lot of qualitative aspects, which can be evaluated through lots of surveys, lots of discussions with potential customers, in some cases direct business as well. But the way I break this down is into three, there is the media value of your assets that you are receiving. There is the brand positioning value which has to be evaluated through customer surveys, and looking at what happened, what was the perception before the sponsorship, or before the investment in after. And the third is, if there is the business relates to a direct link in the business, and if there's a spike in that, and those are typically the three parameters that one would use. So I love it. So if you can give just one piece of advice for any of the businesses out there who are struggling or afraid to enter the beautiful world of the brand marketing, if you can just give them one little advice where they can start, where they can start looking at, or what should be the first little step, what this can be. If you're looking at purely making marketing investments that give you direct business, then creating a long-term legacy organization should probably not be your view. If you're looking at building long-term businesses, brand marketing is the most critical because that gives you the most loyal customer base that goes on for years, and you get so much more value out of customers. And also in the sector, you work with Dimitri, we've seen lots of companies just investing not necessarily on the brand side, but merely just performance side. So my message would be to make some small investments and see the value that that brings to you, and then kind of go from there, because this is long-term value that is being created, and that's the most important. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, Vivek, and finding the time for this conversation. I really enjoyed it, and I'm sure that everyone who listened to it will enjoy this as well. Thank you so much, and have a beautiful rest of your day. Thank you, Dimitri. All this is a pleasure. Cheers. Thank you for having me. [BLANK_AUDIO]
