The economics of Olympics

This book gets a “buy” recommendation, which comes with a strong health warning that it can addle your brains even as it educates and enlightens.

The reason for the “buy” recommendation is the ever-increasing number of TV plus stadium mega-sporting events available for sponsorship. With World Cup and IPL showing the way, they clearly eclipse the old-fashioned saas bahu serials and the new age Internet properties in reach and presumed impact. The real impact of these, at the prices at which they come, is only intuitively known — in fact, the framework for measurement is not well-developed yet. The same, by the way, applies to celebrity endorsements as well, and there is some learning from this book that can be applied to those situations too.

The reason for the severe health warning is that this book is a confusing “khichdi” or jumble sale of all kinds of things that hit you with no particular pattern. A typical chapter — sometimes even a single page — can jump from conceptual frameworks for planning and evaluating sponsorships to Olympic history trivia (delicious tidbits from 600 BC to date, and boring profiles of Olympic heroes) to copious data on the Olympics — the number of athletes, events and nations in every Olympics from 1896 onwards, itemized budget for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, sponsorship revenues in exhausting detail — to case studies on how companies have interacted with the Olympics and used them for brand building. Somewhere in the midst of all this clutter, is a section on how cities should think through and plan for hosting the Olympics. The chapter is helpfully called “The Sports and Politics Cocktail” and is a mix of erudite discussions on the risks and benefits of Olympic sponsorship (“what are the government’s trade policies and how will those affect the Olympic investment decision” and “how will the social dynamic of the community be impacted”) and data tables that, among other things, inform us that Barcelona spent 343,804,115,503 pesetas on road construction when it hosted the event.

What the book has going for it are chapters like “How the Olympics Make Us Feel,” and clear and simple explanations of all marketing concepts for the lay reader. “A brand is the entire organization as seen through the eyes of stakeholders”, “hype is not the same as marketing. Hype usually fails because those who promise it can’t deliver, and those who buy it won’t do so twice” and a step-by-step simple explanation on how companies build their image.

His insights into the psychological reasons why humans are fascinated by sports make very worthwhile reading — it lies in our attitude to competition. In addition to “the thrill of competition”, he urges us to think about the cultural meaning and the values of the event — what the event means to people watching it. With regard to the Olympics, he breaks it up into the Olympic brand, the Olympic experience, and Olympic myths and heroes. The chapter also discusses interesting questions like why so many sports fans support athletes of dubious social character. The thought struck me that we need to dig deeper and get a better handle on what cricket and IPL really means to us Indians, beyond the glib “national unifier, entertainment” labels that we give.

Many chapters have a section called “sponsorship preparation questions” which, collectively, form an excellent and disciplined template for any organization getting into sponsorship activity. For this alone, the book is worth its price.

The rest of it is either the icing on the cake, or the chaff that ruins the wheat, depending on how much of a sports geek and/or sports data geek you are. I must say that despite being neither of the two, I keenly read all the bits about how the sports were conducted in 720 BC and then in 388 BC!

But the editor could certainly have helped the author manage his knowledge better. There are three books in here: “Olympic history over 3,000 years”, “How to use sports marketing effectively,” and “The Olympics partners/bidders hand book.” Since the editors haven’t separated them out for us, that difficult job rests with the reader.

Rama Bijapurkar is the author of ‘We are Like That Only’ (Penguin)

THE OLYMPIC GAMES EFFECT
HOW SPORTS MARKETING BUILDS STRONG BRANDS

John Davis
Wiley
200 pages; $29.95