How India's B2B Brands Swarmed The Indian Premier League

Recently, in the Indian Premier League (IPL) when the Sunrisers Hyderabad demolished the Lucknow SuperGiants at Hyderabad, you'd have likely noticed that both teams prominently featured BKT at the back of their jerseys. Or when Royal Challengers Bengaluru played Punjab Kings, the jersey had KEI Wires and Cables at the back.

It's been something that's gotten me curious over the last few editions. For a league that is probably the biggest consumer sporting event in India — often dubbed as the “second Diwali” or “India’s Super Bowl”, the IPL has fast become a magnet for what are traditionally business-to-business (B2B) or “trade” brands; products that are consumed by other businesses.

If you observe closely, every IPL franchise taking the park today is sporting a B2B brand (be it the jersey, pants, caps or helmets): from paint manufacturers (JSW Paints) to off-road tyre makers (BKT Tires), pipe manufacturers (Astral Pipes, Wavin), cable wire makers (KEI Wires and Cables), solar panel makers (Goldi Solar and Insolation Energy) to logistics service providers (Delhivery). 

That’s quite a departure from the early days of the IPL, when advertising and sponsorship, at least for the first four editions, were almost exclusively consumer-centric, barring Rajasthan Royals, which roped in UltraTech Cement in 2009, and the India Cements-owned Chennai Super Kings, which featured a cement brand on its kit. 

The Playbook reached out to five such advertisers via phone and questionnaires emailed to them. None of them responded in time for publication citing the silent period ahead of their annual earnings.

So, I went down a rabbit hole, and with help from industry experts, tried to unpack this trend. To be sure, business-to-business brands investing in sports isn’t particularly new. It’s been happening over the years, across various leagues, teams, and broadcast partners. Except, over the last three years or specifically, post-pandemic, these brands have been making their presence felt. It also comes at a time, when the overall sports spending pie in India has grown to nearly $1.9 billion (Rs 15,766 crore), a year-on-year increase of 11%, according to a recent GroupM-ESP report. Unsurprisingly, cricket accounted for the lion’s share of the spending (~$1.6 billion or Rs 13,701 crore), growing by 13% on a year-on-year basis. Little wonder, then, that some of these brands are cashing in on not just the IPL’s popularity, but also cricket’s in general.

The Entry

To understand this phenomenon, we need to go back a few decades when Madras Rubber Factory, or MRF began its involvement with cricket. In 1987, it established the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai, which is probably the first instance of a “trade” brand, getting into cricket. Since then, its involvement with cricket has only deepened — from iconic individual bat sponsorships with superstars such as Sachin Tendulkar, Steve Waugh, Brian Lara, and more recently, Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers. The company had previously tied up with the International Cricket Council as a “global partner” between 2016 and 2020.

If MRF led the way in cricket, rival CEAT entered the big league sometime in 2015 when it bagged the IPL’s strategic timeout rights, which in industry-speak is a “central-level sponsorship” i.e. rights sold directly by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). The CEAT deal, according to industry experts, was an opening that later brought a spate of foreign advertisers such as Saudi Aramco and Saudi Tourism. They too followed suit and took up central sponsorship for a couple of seasons. 

“That sort of paved the way for other brands to enter the big sponsorship space,” says Joshey John, director and head of sales at ITW Global, a Bengaluru-based sports consulting company. But, these deals were at the central level.

For Ahmedabad-based building materials company, Astral Industries, the foray into IPL began in 2016, partnering with newcomers Gujarat Lions and Rising Pune Supergiant (teams that replaced the Rajasthan Royals and the Chennai Super Kings which were banned for two seasons). Since then, Astral, which has a market capitalisation of $5.6 billion, has been a constant, having partnered with several teams at various stages.

This year alone, it has four associate partnerships (Mumbai Indians, Punjab Kings, Chennai Super Kings, and Gujarat Titans) and one official partnership with the Lucknow Super Giants. While those might be differently priced, it guaranteed Astral some benefits; a presence on the “lead arm” on the jerseys (for a right-arm bowler, the lead arm would be on the left), in-ground advertising during matches, and offline activations. 

“They (Astral) have been a very prominent brand in cricket for the last 7 to 8 years. They’ve taken up in-stadia advertising for almost every bilateral series that has been played in India,” adds John. An industry estimation of Astral’s spend this season is around Rs 20-25 crore for the five teams’ sponsorships. Ditto for BKT Tires, whose spend this year is estimated at Rs 40-50 crore for back-of-the-jersey sponsorships of seven franchises. The Playbook could not independently verify these figures.

B2B brands, however, are not advertising in IPL only for eyeballs. “It’s mainly about activations and the ability to activate these trade networks. Other than the branding you get on the jersey, there’s a whole lot of experiences that can be created and other deliverables that are part of the deal that can be leveraged,” says John.

Some of those could include meet and greets that typically players from different franchises participate in. Match tickets are often offered as incentives to their dealers and their families, with the opportunity to travel around the country. Dalmia Cement, an associate sponsor of JioCinema, for instance, has bagged access to match tickets, per industry sources, which in turn uses them to incentivise their internal and external trade networks.

“It is not too dissimilar to pharma companies taking out medical representatives on junkets,” says Karthik Srinivasan, a Bengaluru-based communications consultant. “The IPL becomes a huge event for dealers.”

IPL franchises don’t mind it too. “It works well for us. Other than the official partnership, the brand spends more to leverage its association through its activations — either via out-of-home ads, buses, retail shops etc. It also gives visibility to our brands and players, and helps us save on marketing costs,” says an official from an IPL franchise on a condition of anonymity.

This year, Goldi Solar, a Surat-based solar energy company tied up with the Mumbai Indians as the franchise’s official “solar energy partner.” This, according to Dhruv Dholakia, strategy head, Goldi Solar, is an effort to reach out to the consumer market. “It stemmed from our aspiration to refresh our brand and go beyond just the B2B market,” he told The Playbook in an email interaction. “In the Mumbai Indians, we found a perfect reflection of the core values that define our brand - a relentless pursuit of quality, unparalleled dedication, and a drive to excel in every endeavour.”

Post-Pandemic Push

While Astral and BKT may be exceptions having entered the IPL early, the B2B gold rush in the IPL is largely a post-pandemic phenomenon. There are three reasons for this. One, as a sports marketing industry consultant told The Playbook, many of these brands suffered setbacks during the pandemic. So in a way, they’re making up for lost time by lapping up available inventory.

Two, right after the pandemic, in a bid to attract advertisers, franchises had slashed their sponsorship premiums, paving the way for easier entry into the tournament. “The startups took advantage of that. And once the startups faded away due to a funding crisis, the B2B brands saw an opening and took up inventory on the cheap,” says the consultant, before adding “IPL also has a significant advantage, as compared to films because it is played over two-three months every year, while movies are seasonal. So this makes good sense.”

And the third is a broader trend on account of a boom in construction. Building material brands have been dominating the B2B category in the IPL. This includes cement, paints, piping, steel, thermo-mechanical treated (TMT) bars, furniture fitting, sanitaryware, solar fittings, and plywood brands. That probably explains why the Royal Challengers Bengaluru have roped in Astral’s rival KPT Pipes Pvt Ltd as their “official piping partner”, a previously unheard-of sponsorship tier. 

“The surge in the housing sector has certainly played its part,” says John of ITW, before adding, “People have become aspirational and ambitious to own a house. So from that point, most B2B brands have started advertising in all these spaces.”