What the Chennai Super Kings taught me about positioning
And why great marketing is at times exclusive, not inclusive
In 2008, the Indian Premier League was launched.
And new franchises were scrambling to build fan bases from scratch.
Remember, something like this was happening for the first time in India (barring Zee’s ICL, but that’s another discussion).
And this was by no means just an aesthetic problem: The following that these teams would amass meant ticket sales, merchandising, TV deals, and to the multi-millionaire owners of these franchises, bragging rights.
Also, this was a land grab. Though the franchises would, in theory, gather followers and fans in later years, this, the beginning, was critical. For most fans, this would be when battle lines would be drawn, the borders they would adhere to for the rest of their lives would be made clear.
In other words, this was a marketing challenge unlike any other. Millions of cricketing fans were in the fray, billions of cumulative dollars were at stake. It didn’t get bigger than this.
While some teams went for cosmopolitan, everyone-is-welcome imagery and music (Deccan Chargers — Go chargers go, with no mention of Hyderabad itself), some went for more local fare (Kolkata Knightriders’s Bengali song Korbo lorbo jeetbore).
This is the Deccan Chargers promo from 2009. The 2008 version had much the same idea, except they didn’t have the game footage they use here.
None of the teams, however, went at the idea of the local team to the extent that the Super Kings did: All the songs were in Tamil, all the promos were in Tamil (there was one Hindi song, I think, but seldom used), the videos featured temple gopurams, the beloved Marina, boats on the sea, and plastic bat-wielding paatis.
Now this is the 2010 version, but it retains much of the flavour (and the visuals) that the 2008 promo had, including the dancing grandma, a fan favourite.
The campaign was, and still is, almost exclusionary. This is the Tamil team, it seemed to say, to whoever was watching. It did not try what teams like the Deccan Chargers, the Royal Challengers, or even to some extent the Mumbai Indians did: appeal to the cosmopolitan nature of their catchment areas, and try to build a bigger pan-India following (the Mumbai Indians of course could actually do this, they had Sachin).
It worked. The Chennai Super Kings is easily one of the most followed teams in the league. In 2018, as the team returned from a 2 year ban, they dug deep again, releasing this promo. Note again the imagery: The sun, the sea, boats, the music, all of them are repeated, immediately recognisable paeans to the southern country.
That same year, when the home base was shifted to Pune because of political trouble, fans took special trains from Chennai to go watch games, a journey of more than a day to watch a 3 hour cricket match.
By any stretch, that seems an exceedingly silly thing to do. But that’s what happens when you get positioning right. You don’t build a fan base, you don’t build a following, you build a community, you build belonging.
Andrea Cunningham, who I’ve cited before in the newsletter, and who worked with Steve Jobs and the Apple team on the 1984 Macintosh launch, talks of affiliation and differentiation as core aspects of positioning. The Chennai Super Kings got both right. By eschewing universality and stating clearly who they were for, they stood apart, making it easy for a core group to choose and celebrate them. The fans got it, they understood that this was their team, and therein lies the franchise’s phenomenal success as a brand.
PS - The IPL has had several great campaigns, but my favourite has always been the Sony Max’s 2010 Saare Jahan se Accha spot. The context was that the 2009 edition had been conducted in South Africa because the largest democratic and administrative undertaking in the world was happening that year - India’s general elections.
But in 2010, the IPL was back where it belonged, and Sony Max let rip a rabble-rousing promo, unravelling a red carpet for the league from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, set to a rendition of the pre-partition Urdu song Saare Jahan se Accha, Hindustan Hamara (for international readers: it doesn’t translate well, but it means Better than the whole world, our India).
I could extend my thesis, that the success of the IPL can also be explained by how Indian it still is (in all of its colour, noise, and tamasha) inspite of the presence of superstar international players and dedicated watchers across the world.
But that’s for another day.