Why India's Olympic stars fail to dazzle on brand endorsement pitch

Earlier this week, Coca-Cola signed Paris Olympics medals winner Manu Bhaker for Rs 1.5 crore for a one-year endorsement deal for Thums Up. So far, Bhaker had just one endorsement deal — with Performax, ostensibly at Rs 25 lakhs. According to IOS, her handlers, they have received over 40 enquiries and are likely to soon close at least half-a-dozen endorsements on behalf of the double bronze medallist. Good for her!

Neeraj Chopra fell short of gold at Paris this time. But his gold at Tokyo three years ago had opened the endorsement floodgates for the javelin champion — JSW, Noise, BPCL, Eveready, Visa, Under Armour, Tommy Hilfiger, Omega, Tata AIA … all queued up to sign him on. In fact, Yes Bank and Samsung ran campaigns to support him and wish him well just ahead of the Paris games. Neeraj Chopra has been really lucky to encash his Olympian achievements. The silver may not further enhance or embellish Chopra’s personal brand for now, but the thrower is likely to remain in active demand with marketers.

Who else is likely to gain from the recent Olympic outing? Sarabjot Singh, Swapnil Kusale, and Aman Sehrawat all brought home bronze medals, as did the men’s hockey team, with Captain Harmanpreet Singh and goalie PR Sreejesh standing out. And then there was the valiant Lakshya Sen who made it to the badminton semi-finals but fell short of a medal. Vinesh Phogat, poor girl, lost a possible gold by a mere 100 grams. Plus there is the long list of fourth place finishers: Arjun Babuta, Ankita Bhakat, Dhiraj Bommadevara, Maheshwari Chauhan, Anant Jeet Singh Naruka and Mirabai Chanu. All of them would surely be looking at monetising their Olympic endeavours — medal or no medal.

Which really brings me to my hypothesis on Olympic winners and their marketability to brands. Historically, the track record of Olympic medallists making it big with brands has been at best tepid to poor. Abhinav Bindra, despite his 2008 gold at Beijing, did not get a single brand ambassadorship. Over the years, individual Olympic medallists Karnam Malleswari, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, Vijender Singh, Mary Kom, Sakshi Malik, Lovlina Borgohain and others never really got brands interested in them despite their Olympic glory. Leander Paes, Saina Nehwal and P V Sindhu — all bronze winners in different editions of the Games — had professional visibility that went beyond the Olympics. So we won’t include them in the list. But amongst Olympic victors, the only medallist who attracted brands was boxer Mary Kom — she endorsed as many as 25 brands during her professional innings ranging from BSNL, Nestle Every Day, HerbaLife Nutrition to Puma and Vodafone. Having a biopic shot on her helped build the aura and familiarity. With that one exception, the brand endorsement score of Olympians has been by-and-large very poor.

The inevitable question is why? To answer that question, it would be best to look at a recent hoarding put up by batteries brand Eveready featuring Neeraj Chopra. Besides the usual creatives and a big picture of the brand ambassador, the hoarding also carried the full signature of Neeraj Chopra. It is not difficult to guess why. Research must have told the client that a vast majority of their consumer audience did not recognise Chopra! Hence, the need to state and reiterate on the hoarding that the brand was being endorsed by an Olympic champion. Similar stuff has happened in the past with P V Sindhu and recently even with Shubman Gill — not all consumers actually recognise the likes of Neeraj Chopra — and that is the truth.

Recognition and recall are the essential qualifications of fame, hence the basics for any celebrity endorsement. Most Olympic medallists actually fail that basic but essential test itself. There is a lack of universal recognition for most of them. Unlike cricket, which is beamed on television for almost 250 days a year, and hence makes the cricketers familiar to audiences, Olympians hardly get a few hours of “famous” airtime, and then a smattering of pictures in the newspapers the next day. For the most part, they are unknown and invisible to consumers and brands. Their fame too is fleeting and ephemeral.

The sad truth is that despite their heroics and their superhuman Olympian achievements, most Paris medallists will most likely fail to get any deals of consequence with brands. P R Sreejesh could be one of the lucky ones to get some brand endorsements back home in Kerala, but for most others there is little or no real hope.

The writer is chairman of Rediffusion