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Sport as a recreational activity
has witnessed more organized
efforts at marketing in the modern era. The Board of
Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has made Indian Premier League (IPL)
a highly successful sporting event within two years of its launch
in early January 2008. To compete with the globally popular
sports, such as football, tennis and Formula One races, BCCI
introduced and adopted certain fundamental changes to the game of cricket,
and also used the latest entertainment marketing principles. It has
made cricket a balanced product with attractive packaging of
franchisee teams. BCCI has ensured easy availability of IPL to cricket fans
with digital distribution along within stadium presence. Many value
additions have also been introduced to make IPL, not only a
serious competitor to soccer, tennis and Formula One, but also a
generic competitor with other forms of entertainment like movies and
musical performances. BCCI has turned IPL into a successful cricket
offering, expanding its reach to a wide range of sports and
entertainment consumers.
BCCI has accommodated and introduced the following changes to
make cricket more appealing to those who are otherwise busy and not
interested in conventional cricket, which usually tends to be a long drawn out
affair. Thus, it has turned those who were not interested in cricket into
ardent cricket lovers.
Cricketing history reveals the evolution of cricket in the natural
course from test matches to One Day Internationals (ODIs) and finally
to the twenty-twenty version as a more improved and customized
product. Five-day long hauls of test matches were not only testing the talent
and stamina of the cricketers, but also made cricket boring, tedious as
well as a time-consuming sports product. This problem was remedied by the
introduction of ODIs in the early 1970s. |
