5 most famous bat sponsors in Indian cricket
Cricket is a great sport for a brand to promote itself. It is the nature of this beautiful game that makes it an ideal platform for the brands/companies to market themselves. With advertisements after every over and fall of wickets combined with a relatively long game duration if compared to other sports, cricket gives the brand tremendous visibility. There are dozens of ways to market a product or the brand in cricket.
Hoardings on the ground, advertisements on television and title sponsorship are more explicit ways of promoting. Having your brand's name or logo on the team's jersey or a player's bat are implicit techniques. Bat sponsorship is a fantastic marketing tool albeit its success is subject to the batsman's performance.
Consistently performing batsmen attract big brands which are willing to pay big bucks for bat sponsorship deals.
Cricket has an enormous fan base in India and with the exponential growth of television viewers over the last two decades, brands have been increasingly interested in exploring various marketing strategies and bat stickers are one of them.
Here is the list of 5 iconic bat sponsors which have found a place on the bats of some of the greats of Indian cricket.
#1 MRF
The awe-inspiring image of Sachin Tendulkar's elegant straight drive and Virat Kohli's ravishing cover drive has one thing in common - the iconic MRF bat.
MRF stands for Madras Rubber Factory - the largest manufacturer of tyres in India and fourth largest in the world. MRF has a very well thought-out strategy of sponsoring only the world's greatest batsmen and a few extremely promising young talents. The word genius in the bat sticker design signifies two things - one the batsman using MRF bat is a genius at and two, MRF is a genius at doing its work.
MRF has sponsored bats for batting legends like Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, Steve Waugh and Brian Lara. It has also sponsored young Indian batsmen like Sanju Samson and Prithvi Shaw.
MRF pays a hefty amount of money to these cricketers for bat sponsorship. Virat Kohli renewed the deal with MRF in June 2017 at a mind-boggling deal price of over Rs. 100 crore for a period of 8 years, a massive jump from a previous three-year contract priced at Rs. 8 crores.