The Indian Premier League, has always been a very anticipated event in the country every year. With emerging new talents, glitz, glamour, cricketing has never been so exciting. It’s an important time for advertisers in the country too, where brands are promoted in various ways. Airing ads prove to be beneficial in sales as well as brand recall.
This year, Havas Media Group India ordered a research between April 2nd 2021 to May 7th 2021, which was the first leg of the season, across 10 cities in the country, to understand the impact of IPL in influencing brands and identifying the most impactful brands and categories of the season. The research had 4,500 online respondents taking part and the study had some interesting outcomes.
According to the study, defending champions Mumbai Indians were the favorite team, followed by Royal Challengers, Bangalore. Dream11 was the highest recalled main sponsor, followed by Byju’s and PhonePe. Automobile brands like Kia and Renaullt saw increased loyalty conversion. Same was the case with consumer durable brands like Voltas and Havells.
Food delivery brand Swiggy enjoyed high recall with their order frequency going up to 80% of respondents ordering at least once during the match season. E-commerce brands were declared biggest spenders before and during the first phase of the season. With VIVO and Amazon Prime having spent heavily on media, they were placed at the top of their recall hierarchy.
According to Sanchita Roy, head-Strategy, Havas Media Group India, the research was aimed at establishing a direct co-relation between brands and a high impact property like IPL. They wanted to understand the effect of IPL on brands that are a part of key spending categories like fantasy sports, e-commerce, online food delivery, consumer durables etc. According to the results, personal parameters like convenience in shopping and collective parameters like trust saw the highest increase in brands
According to R Venkatasubramanian, president and National head-investments, Havas Media Group India, the second leg of the IPL will most probably supersede the first, with respect to revenue and ratings. Co-inciding with the festive season, one can expect bigger spends with the IPL proving to be crucial platform for advertisers. Star sports has renewed contracts and already has five co-presenting sponsors and 10 associate sponsors from varied categories like telecom, online education and gaming.
The study was titled as HI-CRICKET and was carried out in association with YouGov.
